When Do We Physically Peak? (Physical Peaking Part 1)
Takeaway Points:
Peaking in your career and peaking physically are usually going to be different, especially for weightlifters. While many professional athletes retire from competing in their 20s, it is not necessarily because they have physically peaked.
Within the first 2-5 years a person who is consistently training will be able to understand their physical limits, potentially spending another 5-10 years hitting their maximum potential.
Social factors have a huge impact on both career peaks and physical peaks. High level athletes need time, money, and other resources in order to train at the level required to be competitive. A career usually comes to an end or doesn’t meet its full potential because of one or more of these resources is scarce or withheld from an individual.
When do we physically peak, and how does this impact how we should train?
Recently, I got into a minor fight with a twitter troll. I won’t go into too much detail, but suffice to say that it was a rather exhausting experience.
The fundamental argument of this troll was that someone in their 40’s couldn’t possibly be a strong athlete, because athletes peak around the age of 26. This was a rather confusing claim, given all that I know about the topic, so I asked this person to provide their sources. Ultimately, what they produced was this study.
This is a rather interesting study, because while it does address the topic of “when do people peak”, it’s also one that could be very easily misunderstood by someone who isn’t well versed in reading scientific literature, and this seems to be exactly what happened in this instance.
Peaking In The Careers of Weightlifters
The study was performed by taking data from existing weightlifters, and then using this data to determine when these weightlifters “peaked” in their career and had their best performance. This data was then used to provide the estimated peak age of around 26 mentioned above.
However, it’s important to understand how a study like this works. When you’re doing a study that uses existing data, rather than a study which examines some kind of intervention, what’s going to happen is that your results are going to be limited and informed by how much data you have - that data will almost always be limited in nature, and these limitations could make it hard to get a full picture of what’s going on, especially if there’s some kind of systematic bias in terms of how that data is structured.
For example, the authors of the paper admit, not very far into the paper, that there was some significant flaws in the data. Here’s a paragraph cited directly:
Competition results from the International Weightlifting Federation (IWF) Championships and from Olympic Games were included. The competitions are for Youth (ages 13–17), Junior (ages 15–20), and Senior (15 and older) age groups. Data were obtained from the IWF database2 from 2013 to 2017. Only a few athletes older than age 30 compete in senior championships, thus leading to sparse matrices for estimation. Therefore, only weightlifters up to age 30 were included in the study. All results from weightlifters who received a sanction due to doping offenses were removed. Sanctioned athletes are listed on the IWF website2. Exclusions are described in the study flow diagram (Figure 1).
In short, they were intentionally admitting that all of this data was on athletes 30 years of age and younger, specifically because there simply weren’t enough older athletes in this data pool to draw meaningful conclusions from. You can evidently see why this would skew the results of the study - very likely, there are plenty of older athletes out there, but since they weren’t included in this study, we don’t know how they would impact the data set. Since the data excluded was exclusively from older lifters, we can also assume that this means that they could only have increased the average age of peak performance, because any single peak performance from an older lifter would move up the average, even if only a little bit.
Some further explanation to why this would be the case, is further explored in other parts of the study. Some more quotes:
Athletes may discontinue training at competitive levels due to various reasons. Socio-economic factors and availability of public support differ between countries. This impacts athlete development and athlete career termination (Alfermann et al., 2004; Moesch, 2012). In particular, ages of retirement from elite training differ between countries (Kuettel et al., 2017). However, changes in cultural and political landscapes enable athletes to participate, or participate longer, in a sport, in particular women, which has led to a shift in the age of athletes at the Olympic games over time (Elmenshawy et al., 2015). Such factors impact the pool of available athletes and thus may result in differences in peak age for athletes from different geographic and cultural regions.
The aim of this study was twofold. First, we estimated the age at peak performance in Olympic weightlifting for male and female weightlifters globally and in different geographic regions. Since the performance decline in the younger masters age classes (ages 35–45) is similar between men and women (Huebner et al., 2019), we hypothesized that men and women achieve peak performance at the same age and investigated this globally and for different geographic regions. Second, we quantified the age-associated performance development in adolescent athletes stratified by sex, bodyweight, and performance level as measured by percentiles. Due to the differences in peak age in track and field disciplines (Haugen et al., 2018) we hypothesized that athletes with higher body mass would achieve peak performance at a later age.
To put it short, athletes will often retire or stop competing long before they reach any physical peak age, largely due to other social factors. This means that the above data which suggests that athletes “peak” at age 26 is NOT talking about the age that athletes physically peak - it is talking about the age at which the career of an athlete tends to peak. This may seem like a very small distinction, but it’s an important one.
Career Peaking Versus Physical Peaking
In many sports, athletes tend to peak at a very young age. We might tend to think that this is purely due to physical factors, but the reality is that it’s likely that these factors are far more social in origin. I’ll attempt to explain what I mean by this, in a series of examples drawn from the above study and the way that weightlifting (and by extension to a certain extent, other strength sports like powerlifting and strongman) tend to work.
How Many Years Does It Take To Achieve Peak Performance With Consistent Training?
In general, a serious lifter only takes a few years to reach most of their peak physical potential. This can be identified from that data that we have on training returns over time. For example, Greg Nuckols did a survey on the topic of rates of progression in lifters here. As above, this data set could be flawed, but Greg does a good job of addressing the flaws of this data set within his post.
For example, he found that the average squat after 2-5 years of training was 185.3kg with a standard deviation of 38.1, and the average squat after 5-10 years of training was 216.9kg with a standard deviation of 43.2. We can see that folks can continue to train and develop strength even after a long period of time of consistent training - but at the same time, the rate of progress drops off significantly, especially compared to the very rapid progress of a beginner. By taking the ratio of 185.3/216.9 = .85, we can see that on average, a trainee can attain about 85% of their peak potential within about 2-5 years of training, compared to about 100% within 5-10 years of training.
Naturally, this is a very limited example. Greg doesn’t have good data past 10 years, so we can assume that some people continue to train for longer than a decade and continue to improve, which would skew the earlier numbers down a bit. However, aiming for a lower estimate, let’s say that it’s safe to say that someone can achieve 75-80% of their physical potential within 2-5 years of training.
This is also seen frequently in strength sports. For example, Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson (also called Thor, known as The Mountain from Game of Thrones) was a basketball athlete up until an ankle injury in 2008. He subsequently began training for strongman and competing. In 2011, he competed in World’s Strongest Man and placed sixth - then, he went on to continue training in strongman for many years, continually placing 2nd and 3rd until eventually placing first in World’s Strongest Man in 2018.
In short, Thor had a bit of a headstart because he was already an athlete (and thus had experience training), but it was a very different sport with very different energetic demands. Despite this, it only took him about 2-3 years to hit most of his peak potential (and able to compete at a world level), before then going on another 7 years and peaking.
Likewise, many strong athletes tend to appear, seemingly out of nowhere. I remember when Cailer Woolam, now holder of numerous records, was a nobody who had just posted some very impressive training lifts on social media after he had been training for a year or so - within a couple of years, he was a world record holder with an impressive following. Worse, of course, he was competing at the time in my weight class, and his impressive and rapid rise blew any of my own accomplishments out of the water. I’m not mad, I swear!
In short, it only takes a few years of serious training in order to get a good sense of your absolute limits. With a few years of training, you can have a sense of about 75-85% of your maximum performance, and for those with world class genetics, even 75-85% is probably enough to place you on a national or world class stage. Then, over further training years, you can attain your full potential and potentially set world records.
Naturally, this doesn’t mean that everyone will peak within a few years. Some people may struggle with poor training methods for a long time which artificially hold them back. The use of steroids and other performance enhancing drugs will, of course, also change this significantly. But the main point to understand here is that it probably doesn’t take as long as people think, in order to accomplish most of your performance peak, with serious and consistent training. Then, once you’ve put in your 10,000 hours over a decade, you can further refine and maximize your results.
What Social Factors Influence This Progression?
Now that we understand the typical training path, what social factors could influence it?
Well, basically anything that could get in the way of your ability to train hard and consistently, over a long period of time.
For example, training takes a lot of time, which may be difficult to stick to if you have other demands in your life like long working hours, studies, and other disruptions. Access to the time required to train, as well as the resources required to train, such as good coaching, diet, supplements, etc. - are not universal.
For example, I remember this Buzzfeed article from 2012 entitled “The Strongest Woman In America Lives In Poverty”, which is, well, pretty much exactly what it says on the tin. It explores the struggles of Sarah Robles, top ranked US female heavyweight lifter, who barely made enough money to stay alive.
The demands of her sport required long hours of training, and even when she wasn’t training, she often had to be doing things like cooking the food required to sustain her activity, or taking naps to recover her energy. In short, training was a full time job. Despite that, her salary/stipend from the USAWL was only $400/month, barely enough to cover her food bills. She was able to get by, by aggressively avoiding spending and living with her mother.
A part of the problem was that as a heavyweight lifter, she didn’t have the kind of body that worked well with endorsement deals. Many professional Olympic athletes in the US, if they have stereotypically desirable bodies, can find their way into advertising and endorsement deals that enable them to make more money to live off of. But Robles didn’t have that, and in the absence of any easy way to make a lot of money, she didn’t have the energy to seek out alternative methods for funding her Olympic dreams.
This is a punishing situation, and one that you could expect many reasonable people to turn down, and a perfect demonstration of the social factors that influence competition. Lack of funding or acclaim for her sport within her home country made it incredibly difficult for her to compete.
Elite competition often requires elite levels of effort and support - many of which simply aren’t available to all athletes. This can vary significantly from place to place - for example, funding for Olympic weightlifting is minimal in the United States, while it is significantly higher in places like China and Russia, which tend to dominate in the sport. Likewise, American football is popular in the US, but probably not so much in Russia. The end result of these factors, is that gifted athletes will find themselves invisibly pulled towards those sports which enable them to earn lots of money and acclaim. In the US, this is football - and so, a gifted athlete is more likely to end up becoming a football athlete than they are to become an Olympic weightlifter.
This results in very different pathways for athletes in individual sports across the globe. Athletes may naturally peak earlier or later in their career, differently, in different sports, depending on the social factors that prevail when they are training. An athlete may not be able to make much money and thus need to quit training seriously in order to make a living, to support a sick family member, because a more interesting and potentially lucrative career opportunity comes along, and so on.
(This post ended up being a really long one, so this is where we’ll end the first part! Check back next week for part 2.)
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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