Athlete For Life
Getting Back In Shape As A Former Athlete
by Jeremy Hudson, Athlete for Life
Not long ago I was sitting around a pub table with a few of the guys I coach alongside — volunteer coaches, fathers of the kids on the team. At the end of the night, one of them said playing in his men’s hockey league just wasn’t worth it anymore.
The games ran late — ten thirty on a Tuesday — and the next morning he’d wake up stiff and sore. The guy beside him nodded along. Yeah, not worth it anymore. Getting too old for it.
These are men who spend their evenings around sport, guys who used to play themselves, and even they reach for the same explanation.
You’ve probably told a version of that story to your buddies too. You used to be an athlete — varsity, competitive, the real thing. Then work and kids and fifteen or twenty years happened.
And the story always ends the same way: it would be nice to get back to where you were, but you don’t really believe you ever will. Too old, right?
Eventually some version of that story gets told to a guy like me. And here’s what happens on my end when it does: it runs on deaf ears.
After twenty-seven years of coaching, when someone tells me they’re out of shape because they’re getting old, I don’t hear it at all.
What I actually hear is, “I stopped doing the things that gave me what I want to have.” That’s not a diagnosis. That’s an exposure problem — and it’s a far easier fix than you think.
You don’t lose a piece of your athleticism at every birthday. You lose it with every year that goes by without exposure to the things that made you an athlete in the first place.
Your body did exactly what bodies do when the demand disappears — it stopped keeping those qualities warm. Nothing about that is permanent. You’re not old — it’s quite the opposite. You have untapped potential just sitting there, waiting to be expressed.
The good news is that getting back into baseline shape — looking better, feeling better — can happen quite quickly. The part that takes more time and more intent is everything above baseline. The athletic part. The part you actually miss.
The Three Gates
So where do you start? Not with a diet, and not with a workout plan. You start by finding your actual starting point, and there’s an order to it that I never skip, no matter who walks in — beginner or professional.
Movement comes first: can you squat, hinge, push, pull, and control your core to a real standard? Whatever movements you pass, you earn the right to strength testing. Meet the strength standards, and you earn the right to performance testing — sprints, jumps, agility.
Movement gates strength. Strength gates speed. You can’t perform a test above unless you pass below. Wherever you fall short, that’s your limiter, and that’s where the work starts.
Hold onto that idea, because everything else in this article hangs off it — including the reason so many former athletes wreck themselves in their first month back.
The Week-One Trap
Nobody tells you that your athletic history is what’s most likely to hurt you in week one — so consider this your warning.
People love to talk about muscle memory, and there’s something real underneath it, but it’s not what they think. What you kept from all those years of sport is coordination.
Your nervous system — the software — still knows how to do the movements. It refined those patterns over thousands of reps when you were young, and twenty years off didn’t erase them.
That’s why everything still feels available. You can picture the movement, you can feel it in your body, and when you try it, it’s still there.
But the hardware is a different story. Your muscles, tendons, and ligaments haven’t been asked to do anything athletic in two decades, and they’re not prepared to do what the software is telling them to do. That mismatch is what wrecks you in week-one.
The ex-athlete walks into the gym with his old mindset — “this is what I did twenty years ago, I’ll just start a little easier” — and because he still moves fairly well, nothing stops him. So he pushes and gets really, really sore.
But soreness is the good outcome. The bad outcomes are tendonitis and injury, which put him on the couch telling himself the story he already suspected: see, I’m too old for this. He’s not.
He just ran twenty-year-old software on hardware that needed a tune-up first. And that’s the real lesson of the trap: your athletic past tells me the coordination is still in there, but it can’t tell either of us where you stand today. Only testing can do that.
Testing Ends the Argument
The most common version of this I see: a guy comes in and tells me he squats 315.
He’s not lying — he’s genuinely strong. But he doesn’t pass the squat movement test, so I can’t run his strength test.
When we look closer, his 315 squat is a half squat. It’s a great half squat. But somewhere along the way his range shrank without him noticing, or maybe he did, but didn’t mind as long as load went up.
You’ve been making little trades like that for twenty years. It’s why you keep getting hurt or keep spinning your wheels, and it ends the day you get objective about your training.
That’s the whole point of objective testing — it exposes the holes, and there’s no arguing with it.
You can start checking this on yourself today. Below are four of the movement screens I use with every returning athlete — split squat, hinge, push, pull.
Try them exactly as shown, to the standard shown. Passing them doesn’t mean you’re ready for everything, but failing any one of them tells you precisely which gate is closed right now.
Split Squat – Drop Back Knee Screening Test
RDL Screening Test
Pushup Screening Test
Horizontal Row Screening Test
Click here to view the videos.
The Runway
Once you know your starting point, here’s the honest picture of the road back. There’s a runway: somewhere between six and sixteen weeks of preparation before you return to the kind of training you remember. That gets you back to baseline shape.
That phase is about making sure you move really well and preparing your tissues — making muscles and tendons stronger and more resilient, teaching them to generate force, giving your ligaments back their stability, and building the capacity to sustain the workload of the training to come.
Notice what I’m not saying. I’m not telling you to lower your expectations. The effort you bring can be the same effort you brought twenty years ago. The loading is what changes, temporarily.
Effort like you’re twenty-five, loading like you’re forty-six. Do that, and getting back to training like an athlete again is not a stretch. It’s realistic. The real starting point is generally not as far away as you fear.
The Switch
And then there’s a moment I’ve watched happen enough times to promise you it’s coming. Let me give you a recent example from a client of mine.
Like most ex-athletes, he came back to lifting heavy, because heavy is what men default to. Heavy lifting made him feel strong. But strong wasn’t the thing he was missing.
The shift started when we began implementing power work — jumps, plyometrics, movements executed with the intent to be fast. Over the months that followed, his deadlift climbed to over two times his bodyweight, and his time on the 5Back Sprint agility drill dropped by more than half a second.
To put that in context, the whole drill only takes a few seconds start to finish — so shaving half a second off it is a massive improvement. That pairing is the proof that matters: the strength he built was converting into power he could express.
It is not the heavy lifting that makes someone feel like an athlete. It’s the power they express.
When you feel real speed and real power come out of your body again, that’s the day “I was an athlete” quietly becomes “I am one.” The switch is still there. It’s just waiting for you to find your starting point and run the runway.
Stay athletic,
Jeremy
–30–
Jeremy Hudson is a strength and conditioning coach (NSCA-CSCS) with 27 years in the field. He runs Athlete for Life in London, training adults in their 30s through 60s to move like athletes again. Curious how you’re actually holding up? Find your Athletic Age in three minutes: athleteforlife.ca
