When you hear the word athlete, what comes to mind? Many of us will picture an Olympian, a professional basketball player, or someone with incredible speed, strength, or endurance. But you do not need a medal, a uniform, or a professional contract to be an athlete. The truth is that everyone is an athlete in everyday life. If you have a body that moves through the world, you rely on the same fundamental physiological, biomechanical, and neurological systems used by Olympic competitors.
Daily actions like squatting to pick up a child, lunging to grab a dropped item, or carrying groceries are foundational, multiplanar movements that require athletic coordination and core stability. Your body continually adapts to the physical demands you place on it, including through changes in muscle, bone, and cardiovascular capacity. We want to continue performing these movements through all stages of life, and to do that, we need to think of training not only as exercise, but as preparation for life.
What Does It Mean to Be an Athlete?
As a physical therapist and movement educator, I’ve worked with everyone from elite athletes to people recovering from injury, and I’ve come to appreciate something important: the qualities that make someone a great athlete are the same qualities that help all of us move through life with confidence.
Strength is often highlighted, but we also need to consider the other attributes of athleticism, such as mobility, balance, coordination, agility, power, and endurance. These different elements of athleticism show up in ordinary moments every day.
Can you react quickly when you trip on an uneven sidewalk? Can you rotate comfortably to grab something from the back seat of the car? Can you step over a fallen branch on a hike without feeling unsteady? Can you get down to the floor and back up again with ease?
These measures of athleticism matter far more than the number on a stopwatch or a medal on the podium. They help shape our quality of life, functional independence, and ability to remain fully engaged in the activities that matter to us. If longevity is the long game, we need to view aging as a training opportunity for the athlete in all of us.
Aging Is a Training Opportunity
Somewhere along the way, we’ve accepted the idea, or been told, that getting older automatically means slowing down. Our bodies do change, but function can decline more quickly when we do not continue challenging our strength, balance, mobility, and coordination.
Changes in muscle mass, balance, and reaction time can occur with age, but they should not automatically be treated as unavoidable reasons to stop moving. Just like the professional athlete, our bodies are incredibly adaptable. Our muscles and bones respond to strength training, and our nervous system continues learning new movement patterns when we provide the appropriate stimulus.
Public health guidance also supports a varied approach to movement. The CDC recommends that older adults include aerobic, muscle-strengthening, and balance activities in their weekly routines. The National Institute on Aging similarly identifies physical activity as an important part of healthy aging.
We provide this type of varied movement stimulus throughout our on-demand library and live LYT classes. That’s why the LYT movement practice includes movements that don’t always resemble traditional exercise.
I love creating new classes with this intentionality, exploring unfamiliar or less-practiced patterns that challenge the body while helping prepare it for the unpredictability of life. Your brain can learn and refine movement patterns through practice, and the body is remarkably adaptable when we give it the appropriate challenge, consistency, and recovery.
Train for the Demands of Everyday Life
Think of athletic training as an investment in your future movement. This multilayered approach to training is not just for athletes on the playing field. It is for every person who wants to support balance, maintain confidence in movement, preserve physical function, and continue exploring the world with ease.
Training your inner athlete should include:
- Strength to lift, push, pull, and carry.
- Mobility to move through healthy ranges of motion.
- Balance to stay steady on uneven surfaces.
- Coordination to move efficiently.
- Agility to change direction and respond quickly.
- Power to generate force when you need it.
- Endurance to keep doing the activities you love.
- Recovery so your body remains resilient over time.
These abilities work together. Strength may help you rise from the floor, but mobility, balance, coordination, and confidence help you perform the entire movement with control.
Train Your Inner Athlete
And my personal goal for my inner athlete is to stay nimble. What could be more gratifying than to feel light on my feet, move fluidly between positions, get down to the floor and back up again, and twist, reach, climb, crawl, balance, hop, skip, handstand, and play?
I train myself with the same tools that I share with professional athletes, my LYT students, and our community of LYT instructors. We don’t have to earn the title of “athlete” because we already are athletes. Our sport just happens to be life, played on an open-ended, uncharted field, where we train to stay curious, capable, and independent.
Most of all, I hope you train your inner athlete so that your body continues to say “YES” to the life you want to live.
Put These Athletic Skills Into Practice
Join Lara’s workshop, Train Like an Athlete, to develop strength, mobility, balance, agility, coordination, power, and endurance through an intentional LYT movement practice.
New to the method? Learn how the LYT Yoga Method combines physical therapy principles, functional movement, and yoga to help you move with greater awareness and confidence.
