Veteran athletes: Do take longer to recover

In a previous issue I posed the question “ Do older athletes take
longer to recover?” Anecdotally, my own extensive experience
and years of talking with high level masters athletes from
many sports tells me they will all say the same thing - the
older I get the longer it takes to recover from training or racing
or I don’t bounce back like I used to.
I am now in position from my own research team’s work to
say answer that long-asked question “ Do older athletes take
longer to recover?”
Our research strongly suggests older athletes DO take longer
to recover from muscle damaging exercise such as that
undertaken by veteran track and field athletes. This paper will
present what we did to answer the above question, what we
found through our laboratory testing, and more importantly
what the implications are for enhancing recovery for veteran
athletes.