Transcription
Have you ever wondered if pickleball is enough exercise for someone over 50? If you play more than four and a half hours a week, you're probably meeting the baseline physical activity guidelines, but you may be training in a way that makes you slower. Not because you're not exercising, but because the way most of us structure our off-court workouts, we may be accidentally stacking the wrong kind of intensity. And that shows up on the court as feeling sluggish and making sloppy mistakes.
So, in this video, I will cover everything that pickleball players over 50 need for their aerobic fitness. I'll show you a quick way to audit your play so you know how much activity pickleball already gives you. I'll give you a weekly template based on the 80/20 principle that Iron Man athletes use to build endurance and speed and decision rules to guide when you need to add intensity or back off to avoid injury. After this video, your training won't just be a guessing game. You'll know exactly what you need to play your best and feel your best. Let's get to it.
Pickleball players seem to fall into two camps. One says, "Pickleball is enough. I play a ton. I don't need to do any extra workouts." And the other one says, "Pickleball is just play. If I really want to optimize my fitness and my performance, I need to do my real training off the court." And the tricky thing is both camps are partly right, but partly wrong. Pickleball does cover more conditioning than many people realize, but it doesn't give us the specific ingredients that keep us fast, durable, and sharp week after week.
Research on older pickleball players shows several key things. For doubles, about 78% of on-court time is active play. And a big chunk of that active play, 66%, is in the low and moderate heart rate zones with only about a third in a vigorous range. So for every hour that we're on the court, about 47 minutes is active play. 31 minutes fall in zones 1 and 2, and about 16 minutes are in zone 3. So if we play around 4 and 1/2 hours a week, we're meeting the minimum for the physical activity guidelines that say 150 minutes of moderate or 75 minutes of vigorous intensity activity or some combination each week. Campers in the "pickleball is enough" camp are right. Just playing does give us a solid amount of conditioning.
Zone 2 in particular is a sweet spot for building an aerobic fitness base. It's a high enough intensity where we get a lot of aerobic benefit without overtaxing our recovery. Some of the adaptations that we get from it are better oxygen delivery, more muscle mitochondria, and better lactate handling on the court. These equate to less fatigue, fresh legs for longer, and faster recovery between points. So, zone 2 from pickleball definitely supports our endurance. We get to the point that we can play all day, but it doesn't help keep us quick.
After around age 30, we gradually lose fast-twitch fibers. So, we will get slower if we don't specifically train for speed and power. This is where the off-court camp gets it right. We do need more. But a common mistake that these campers make is they assume any cardio counts as long as they work up a sweat. So they may add on a couple of 45-minute runs or hourlong elliptical sessions that put them in about the zone 3 range of training. The problem is this level of intensity is actually training their bodies to be slower because moderate intensity continuous training primarily stimulates our slow-twitch fibers. And it's even been shown to induce a shift in fiber types from fast to slow. This is fine if you're training for Kona and only need endurance, but pickleball players need speed and power and quick reaction times that come from fast-twitch fibers.
Not only that, zone 3 training isn't challenging enough to generate the adaptations that we get from higher intensity workouts, but it still adds to our recovery debt. So, it stresses our bodies without much additional benefit. That's why endurance athletes follow the 80/20 principle where the majority of their training, 80%, is in deliberately easy zones 1 and 2, and only a smaller slice, 20%, is in the upper zones 4 and 5. They minimize living in the middle intensity too often because it stacks fatigue. Small doses in zones 4 and 5 lead to huge gains in cardiorespiratory fitness. In pickleball, that translates into being able to push harder for longer and recover rapidly. And it also activates and strengthens our type II fast-twitch fibers. So we have more speed, power, and explosive responses. And even though these workouts are short, they are difficult. So there's the added benefit that they build mental toughness.
This polarized training principle is perfect for pickleball because most of our lower intensity efforts come from playing, and our off-court hard work is focused and limited, adding at most two high-intensity sessions per week. So, if you're on the court 6 hours a week, you're getting a little over 3 hours per week of zones 1 and 2, 186 minutes to be exact. If that's our 80%, then we need 46 minutes of zones 4 and 5 to meet our 20%. But you count the whole time you're exercising, not just the interval itself. So, the 4x4-minute high-intensity session that I describe here equates to about 30 minutes if you include a 5-minute cool-down. And the 6x5-second sprint intervals come out to about 15 minutes because I allow two to three minutes to fully recover between each.
If you play more like 10 hours a week, you don't need to bump up the high intensity to try to meet the 20%. The key is to keep it polarized. And for those of us over 50, we shouldn't do more than two high-intensity sessions per week. And definitely don't add any off-court jogging or elliptical sessions because then we run the risk of being under-recovered and that affects everything: energy levels, sleep quality, play quality, reaction time, and it increases our risk of injuries.
So, here are the decision rules to help you determine week by week if you need to cut out any activity, or if you can safely add more. By the way, I made a PDF of all of this that you can link to in the description. It covers how to do your zone audit, the 80/20 principle, samples of the high-intensity interval training and sprint interval training, and these decision rules. My only ask in return is that you share this video with one or two of your pickleball peeps. It helps me grow the channel and helps build our community of senior players who are interested in being our best.
Here are the rules.
Scenario one: If your body feels beat up and sore, your joints and tendons are cranky, your legs feel dead even after warm-up, you have aches and pains that linger into the next day, this is an indicator of tissue fatigue. The best move in this case is to reduce volume, starting with sprint intervals and then reduce your high-intensity interval training. Then, if you're still hurting after that, decrease your pickleball play. The reason for this is we need to reduce tissue load, and that means decreasing volume.
Scenario two: If you feel amped but tired, if you can't fall asleep at night and you wake up early, if you feel edgy and lack motivation, if your heart rate bumps up quickly even with easy efforts, that's an indicator that your nervous system is under stress. The best move in this case is to cut intensity, then maybe add some easy zone 2 as a downshift tool. So, the first step is to cut in half your sprint interval training and your high-intensity interval training this week. Consider adding 20 to 40 minutes of easy zone 2 walking to see if that helps sleep. And remember that zone 2 is the pace where you're breathing a little bit harder, but you can still talk in complete sentences. Be careful to avoid bumping up into zone 3 because that only adds more stress. The reason for this is that when our nervous system is hot, we need to smooth out some of the spikes. And zone 2 can promote recovery if we've decreased intensity.
Scenario three: If you feel fine overall, but you fade late in the day, so you're sleeping well, your joints feel great, you're good the first 60 minutes, but then you start to drop off in your performance, or you're having trouble recovering between points, this indicates that you have a fitness gap. And the best move here is to add zone 2. So, tack on a couple steady zone 2 sessions per week because that helps to build the fitness base with low cost to our recovery.
Scenario four: You feel great. You're sleeping well, your body's pain-free, your energy is solid, and you can play all day. Then you can consider adding one or two reps to your sprint interval training, or add a fifth 4-minute rep in your high-intensity intervals every other week, but not both. The other thing you could consider is increasing the number of sets that you do in your strength training, because this video was all about your aerobic fitness.