When Do We Physically Peak? (Peaking Part 2)
Takeaway Points:
Olympic weightlifting is the main professional lifting competition, but Olympic athletes cannot be used to assess averages for lifters. The people who make it to the Olympics have genetic and social advantages that make them the best in the world.
The margin of winning at these high levels is so small that even the most dedicated and talented athletes may never make it to the Olympic Games and could quit trying to compete well before their physical peak.
Research in masters lifting has shown that most lifters were physically peaking between ages 30-35, and although their abilities do start decreasing, it’s at a much smaller and slower rate than people tend to expect.
Career peaking is a social construct and should not be used as the only way to measure expected performance and growth.
(This is part 2 of a 2 part series on the topic. For part 1, see here.)
What Specific Demands Of Olympic Weightlifting Influence This Progression?
Another important social factor is the demands of Olympic weightlifting, and by extension, Olympic competition itself.
When you’re going to the Olympics, the goal is not to provide your ten best athletes and make a good show of things. The goal is to provide your single best athlete, and for your single best athlete to place as highly as possible. You don’t send ten athletes and hope that you’ll clear gold, silver, and bronze, for example - you pick your one best athlete, and hope that they get gold. The point of the Olympics is to pit athletes from different countries against each other, and see which sport has the best athletes in that year.
Further, the Olympics are not a place where the “average” athlete goes to compete. It’s a place where, by definition, you’re selecting for the biggest genetic outliers possible. Every single competitor at an Olympic level is one of the best of the best, and that means that they’ll be selected for every possible little genetic mutation that could possibly help. If your sport benefits from being taller, then all your competitors at an Olympic level will be incredibly likely to be exceptionally tall. If having large hands is a benefit (swimming), then Olympic athletes are all probably going to be folks with exceptionally large hands.
Thus, it’s not meaningful to use “average” results as a yardstick for what goes on in the Olympics. Everyone in the Olympics is well above average, and has to be in peak shape to compete.
What this means, is that when folks don’t have everything going for them, there’s very little tolerance. If you’ve got 10 folks all training for weightlifting, and they all have similar results, even something like being 1-5% less competitive than your teammates can mean the difference between “going to the Olympics” and “being kept home while your teammate goes instead”. It’s all or nothing.
Since new athletes are coming up every year, that also means that every year that you continue to train and compete, is another year that you can potentially find yourself quickly replaced by some new guy who is training about as hard as you, but just has some genetic advantage that you don’t. If you’re not continually training hard and improving, and lucky enough that no one else is passing you, then you can quickly get passed up.
Naturally, this tends to force people out of this kind of competition early. Someone may not actually hit their full physical peak, but instead be passed up by a teammate five years before they hit some theoretical physical limit. At this point, what’s the point? Why continue to train in a hard and all-consuming way, if it’s clear at this point that you’ll never measure up to the next guy, and never get the chance to go to the Olympics?
It’s worse when it comes to weightlifting, a sport which is not generally particularly prized outside of the Olympics. There are other places to compete, and the lifts are sometimes used elsewhere (strongman, CrossFit), but the main reason to train as an Olympic weightlifter, is, well, the Olympics. As a result, the reality is that while people could continue to train and compete well into their masters years, there’s not much motivation or reason to do so unless you just genuinely love the sport regardless of social factors - which isn’t really that many people, at the end of the day.
It can be different for sports that are structured differently. For example, powerlifting and strongman are by definition “amateur sports” which don’t have a ton of money associated, or a pathway to money or fame baked in, in the way that Olympic weightlifting is supposed to. As a result, these sports are generally something that people train for because they want to, well aware that they won’t get a ton of money or fame out of it. Even then, many tend to drop out of these sports after a few years of training, when they start to peak in their training results but don’t want to keep training hard forever in the absence of external validation of their efforts.
When Do We Actually Physically Peak?
So the next question is, of course, when do we actually physically peak? At what point do our bodies hit their natural limits, and start to decline year over year afterwards?
Luckily, the same researchers who did the above study about career peaking in Olympic weightlifting, also did a study on the decline of performance in masters lifters. In this study, they took data on lifters from 35+ years and then compared their performances over time to see how much they declined from year to year.
What they found might be surprising. Folks tend to peak at around 30-35, and then decline consistently year over year after that - but probably less than most people think. For example, at age 40 the average performance is about 95% of the age 35 performance (with standard deviations - so some folks did as well as 97.5% as well as their age 35 performance). It appears that performance declines just about 1-1.5% per year for men after age 35, meaning that you could see, for example, a 55 year old lifter who is still about 80% as good as their 35 year old counterpart.
This is probably a lot less than people think, but it is consistent with other data out there. For example, Greg Nuckols did an analysis on powerlifting data and found that lifters can continue to train and grow at similar relative rates even into higher ages.
Likewise, we have numerous instances of world record performances set by folks at significantly older than expected ages. For example, both men and women have set world powerlifting records at greater than 40 years old. Notably, Donnie Thompson’s superheavyweight world record total of 3000lbs was set when he was 47. For women, Rheta West set a world record total of 1570lbs in the 148lb weight class at the age of 42.
This makes sense, when you understand that physical peaking actually occurs later than people expect, and we tend to lose our physical ability at a slower rate than people expect. If someone has genetics that place them at a 40% advantage relative to somebody else, but don’t actually start training until later in life, the end result is that their career could peak well into their 30’s or 40’s rather than the more commonly expected 20’s to early 30’s. Even then, if the negative from aging is only a few percentage points, that would only cut a little bit off the top of that lifter’s ability, and thus they could still potentially set records and be highly competitive against lifters who may be decades their junior, but simply don’t have the same genetic advantages.
I fondly remember an early mentor in my training career. He was an older lifter who had been lifting consistently for decades, and as a result he was stronger in his 60’s than I was in my 20’s. I met him at my local YMCA where I first started training, and he gave me a lot of advice and help - when I ordered my first competition singlet, it failed to arrive in time and he actually let me borrow an old one of his that fit me well enough.
At one point, he vanished for a few months, and when he came back I asked him where he had been - the answer was apparently “recovering from surgery”, because he had had bowel cancer and they had told him to take 6 weeks off after to recover. Instead, he took 3 weeks off and jumped back into training however he could. He was a huge inspiration, and part of the reason that I got into the sport as strongly as I did.
The Reality Of Peaking
From the above, it should be clear that exactly when someone peaks in their lifting career is often NOT decided by physical factors. The reality is that while the physical decline of lifters as they age is certainly a real and meaningful process, it’s rarely what decides where someone peaks in their career.
Lifters are used to training hard and improving, and they often lose interest and move on to other training goals when they begin to hit their natural limits and progress stalls. This, combined with the high stakes of the demands of professional sport, means that very often, even a small 1% decrease in competitiveness due to age can mean the difference between “continuing to train hard with the hope of hitting stronger numbers” and “packing it up and moving on”. New lifters are always being born and jockeying for the top spot.
The end result is that careers are defined not by the actual physical limits of athletes. We can imagine a world in which sports are more carefully divided into age brackets or something similar, and the end result is a fairer form of competition that allows lifters to essentially compete indefinitely against others in their exact age and weight classes. In such a situation, we could get a much better picture of the decline of strength over time, and thus have a better sense of the true limits of human physical achievement.
However, such a situation would be extremely unlikely to come to fruition. Strength sports are already relatively under-competed, due to the greater interest in (and money involved with) mainstream sports. Many powerlifting meets may feature only one or two competitors in a given competitive weight/gender class, because there simply aren’t that many lifters out there and the demands of geographic population distribution mean that, on average, there won’t be that many people in your local area who are serious lifters looking to compete. Further subdivide these classes by age, and you’ll quickly find a lot of meets where some classes (young males) are overrepresented, and everyone else is competing in a class all by themselves.
This is perfectly fine when the goal is to push your own limits, see what you can accomplish, and chase your own personal peak. Many folks could very easily get into lifting later in life and have a wonderful lifting career in the masters division - many of them could even compete relatively toe to toe with younger lifters, if they tried.
The lack of will to do so, and the way that our society is not efficiently designed to seek out and produce strong, durable, long term lifters, means that there will, by necessity, be significant differences in “career peaking” versus what could be called “biological peaking”. This will also vary significantly from area to area - depending of course on just the general interest in the sport, the amount of money available and the pathways that it can open up for career lifters, and so on.
Thus, career peaking is a kind of social construct. This isn’t to say that it isn’t real. What the above examined study tells us is not when people actually physically peak, but when their careers tend to peak. In this way, it can be a valuable tool - it gives us an idea of when we’re most likely to succeed in the traditional way within the constraints of the prevailing circumstances. However, it should not be taken as a yardstick of when people are actually necessarily strongest or most competitive in their lifetimes, which could easily happen earlier or later simply due to a combination of your genetics and when you get into the sport and start training.
About Adam Fisher
Adam is an experienced fitness coach and blogger who's been blogging and coaching since 2012, and lifting since 2006. He's written for numerous major health publications, including Personal Trainer Development Center, T-Nation, Bodybuilding.com, Fitocracy, and Juggernaut Training Systems.
During that time he has coached hundreds of individuals of all levels of fitness, including competitive powerlifters and older exercisers regaining the strength to walk up a flight of stairs. His own training revolves around bodybuilding and powerlifting, in which he’s competed.
Adam writes about fitness, health, science, philosophy, personal finance, self-improvement, productivity, the good life, and everything else that interests him. When he's not writing or lifting, he's usually hanging out with his cats or feeding his video game addiction.
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