Collagen: the older athlete’s route to recovery

As athletes age, they experience a number physiological changes that directly impact the ability to compete in and excel at sport. However, while there is a slow decline in performance, what most aging athletes really notice is a decreased ability to recover from exercise. The muscles and joints are stiffer for just a bit longer, and it takes a little longer to bounce back from challenging training sessions. It’s not so much that performance suffers, it’s more a case that extra time is necessary before that performances can be repeated again. If you love to train and challenge yourself, it’s not what you want!

Speeding up recovery

The challenge is how to mitigate these changes so athletes can continue to do what they love at as high a level as possible. There are many strategies that can help to arrest age-related changes in function. All of these strategies aim to enhance recovery, which as stated above, appears to be the most problematic factor as athletes age. The most effective way of course to optimize recovery is through the effective training design, ensuring that intensity, volume, and frequency are controlled in a way to accommodate changing recovery capabilities. When there’s a more judicious application of work, there’s less to recover from.

However, it’s also possible to speed up the recovery process, either through internal or external means. While ‘external’ means of recovery, such as massage, temperature therapy, and other related modalities are the subject of much discussion, it’s the ‘internal’ recovery strategies that are the most effective. Stress management, sleep, and nutrition form the foundation of effective recovery - even more so as athletes age.

Given the food we eat is the fuel for our efforts, knowledgeable athletes have made nutrition the main focus of their recovery efforts. Historically, carbohydrate has been the main focus of recovery nutrition, with an emphasis on replacing the fuel that’s consumed during training. While extremely important, this focus is incomplete; more recently, there’s been an emphasis on the quality, quantity, and timing of protein intake, as recovery nutrition isn’t just about replacing used fuel, but also helping to re-build the muscle fibers that have been damaged during exercise. This additional emphasis has been effective at aiding recovery efforts.