SAQ For Aging Athletes

Let's pretend we're not so old!

SAQ, Speed, Agility and Quickness. It’s easy to see how training SAQ will help a competitive athlete, but let’s look deeper to see why it’s even more valuable as we age. SAQ training can impact the following:

• Greater proprioception, meaning better spatial and positional awareness, a key in fall prevention.

• Strengthens myelin, the protective sheathing around nerves, improving nerve transmission and signal speed. This gives quicker reactions and faster recognition of unstable movements such as irregular surfaces and tripping hazards.

• Improved neutralization of antagonist muscles. Often, stiffness, awkwardness, and falling is facilitated by tight antagonist muscles. These are the muscles that attempt to slow and stabilize you, but often activate to take control of movements when they should not be interfering. This can slow reaction time and movement speed, again contributing to falls. Antagonist muscles tend to get involved any time you’re not sure of your movements.

• Enhanced metabolism as a result of rebuilding fast-twitch motor units, which burn high percentages of sugar and glycogen.

• Greater agility and range of motion.

• Increased bone density.

• Regaining lost movement skills.

Training SAQ in seniors isn’t about reducing your time in the 40-yard sprint for the NFL combine or improving your vertical to dunk a basketball. It’s about giving us geezers a body and a mind that is prepared for whatever life throws at us and maybe improving our golf, tennis, or pickleball game. Being 70, 80, or 90 years old is not something you will enjoy if your body is weak, and your reaction time and balance are poor. One effective way to prepare yourself for the challenges of geriatricity, or to help yourself if you’re already there, is SAQ training, but at a level perhaps much less than that used by professional and Olympic caliber athletes. We can do the same things but perhaps not quite as hard, nor as fast.

The maximum force production required in speed training, generates improvements in the neuromuscular system and, hence, in overall physical capacity. If you’re 97 and someone’s toddler or service animal bumps you from behind at about knee level, there’s a good chance you could fall, and a probability of injuries ranging from bruises to a shoulder separation, a broken wrist (if you try to catch yourself with your hands) or (heaven forbid) a broken hip. But what if you have the SAQ to catch yourself, grab onto someone or a store shelf, or even pirouette athletically and just not fall?

Should us old timers be jogging? Well, maybe. There’s not likely to be any harm and jogging can give you the motor skills needed for running faster than your sedentary counterparts. It’s also good for your heart. But running shorter distances, much shorter, at higher speeds can provide just as much fitness with the bonus of enhancing athletic ability and range of motion. Sprinting will increase functional range of motion, because running faster means longer strides and more dynamic use of the hip, knee and ankle. It will also enhance your balance.

SAQ workouts demand precision as poor form can lead to injuries, so working with a good coach is important. Working within the limits of your abilities is equally important. If we’re training to run fast and jump high, or to do somersaults (an important skill) we’d better make sure we don’t hurt ourselves by trying to progress too quickly. In my class of seasoned citizens, the average age is about 75. Not surprisingly, many of them have forgotten how to skip, run, jump over obstacles, and nearly all of them balked at the suggestion of doing somersaults or performing the Japanese art of Seiza, which entails squatting, rolling forward onto your knees and then sitting back onto your heels. This is the traditional Japanese posture for both eating and meditating. I think it is the rare Japanese senior who can’t do this and the rare American over 45 who can. It is the easiest(!) answer to the challenge I give to seniors to find a way to get down onto the floor and back up again without using their hands. Some of them can barely get up off the floor at all on day one.

Now, are these important skills for the senior set? My answer is yes. Because one day we all will die, but on every other day we won’t. These SAQ skills, as well as good nutrition and weight management, are keys to something called healthspan. Lifespan is the number of years we are alive; healthspan is the number of years that we enjoy. Legendary fitness guru Jack LaLanne was said to be working out for 1-2 hours daily in his early nineties.

Acceleration- I teach young athletes how to accelerate explosively and seniors should have this skill as well. However, it is far better, for those who haven’t exploded out of the starting blocks in several decades, to first work on gradual acceleration. That might mean going from their usual casual stroll to a fast “power walking” gate, or it might mean accelerating from a walk to a skip or a jog, or it might mean accelerating from a 4-5mph jogging pace to a 6-7mph “sprint.” It’s simply a matter of pushing down on the gas pedal and going faster than you’re accustomed to going, then becoming accustomed to that quicker pace and then going a little faster than that. It’s a gradual progression, as all improvements in movement and athleticism should be.

“Silly” exercises, like skipping and karaoke (sometimes called vining, just walking or jogging sideways, crossing your feet over each other) help to develop body control and awareness, critical skills in fall prevention, and useful in the event of something unforeseen, like a car rounding a corner just as you step off the curb to cross the street. Agility drills such as “fast feet” reaction drills where you try to follow a coach’s commands to quickly shift forward, back, right, or left, or a partner drill where you try to stay in front of your partner and your partner tries to fool you. These teach recognition and reaction to external stimuli, starting, stopping, and changing direction and the skill of aligning your body as linearly as possible in multidirectional movements for optimal balance.

SAQ, it isn’t just for pro athletes anymore.