It's All Downhill After 40. Your Job as a Coach Is to Make the Hill Smaller.
A new way to think about coaching clients in the third phase of life.
Most coaches treat aging like a problem to be solved.
Your 55-year-old client wants to deadlift more than they did at 40. Your 62-year-old wants to run a faster 5K than they did in their 30s. And the fitness industry sells them the dream — “60 is the new 40,” “you can defy aging,” “your best years are still ahead of you.”
It’s a great pitch. It’s also dishonest.
Here’s the truth: the human body has three phases. You grow. You peak. You resist. And once you’re past peak, you don’t get to climb back up the hill. The slope only goes one way.
This isn’t pessimism. It’s biology. And once you accept it, you can finally coach it well.
That’s what this month’s featured LearnRx class, Resisting Entropy, is about.
The Three Phases of Life
The class lays out a simple framework for thinking about a human lifetime. There are three phases:
Grow (0 to 25). Organ systems are developing. The brain is finalizing. The body is building.
Peak (25 to 40). Maximum reproductive capacity. Maximum physical expression. Most clients arrive at your gym somewhere in this window.
Resist (40 to 85). Cells die. Strength wanes. Memory fades. The body trends toward disorder. This is the phase most of your clients will spend the majority of their adult life in.
Notice the language. Phase three isn’t “decline.” It isn’t “post-peak.” It’s resist. Because that’s what the work actually is — actively pushing back against the natural drift toward entropy.
Why “Improvement” Has to Be Redefined
Here’s where most coaches get it wrong. They take the same playbook they use with a 28-year-old and apply it to a 58-year-old. Add weight. Add volume. Hit a PR. Improvement = bigger numbers.
That works for a while. Then it stops. And when it stops, the client starts to feel like the problem.
It isn’t the problem. The frame is.
A client in the resist phase isn’t going to set a lifetime maximum back squat at 65. They’re not going to PR their mile time at 70. That’s not what their body is built to do anymore. So if “improvement” only means heavier loads and faster splits, you’ve already lost.
What does improvement actually look like in this phase? Consistency. Showing up week after week, year after year. Cognition. Staying sharp, learning, building emotional depth. A slower slope on the curve. The hill is going down. Your job is to make it go down as slowly as possible.
The 30,000 Session Idea
One of the most useful reframes in the class is what James calls the 30,000 session idea. From the time a person is upright until they’re 85, they have roughly 30,000 opportunities to move. That’s the number.
Most clients show up obsessed with the next session, the next PR, the next race, the next test. Patience evaporates.
The 30,000 number changes the conversation. There’s no rush. There’s no single workout that makes or breaks anything. There’s a long, finite arc, and the win is just to keep stacking sessions across the slope.
That’s a coaching frame your client over 40 needs more than another deadlift cue.
21st Century Resistance
There’s one more piece worth flagging. In the modern world, resistance doesn’t show up by default. Medicine, technology, industry, and automation are all designed to make life easier. Your client doesn’t need to lift anything heavy to get through the day. They don’t need to walk far. They don’t need to recover from physical effort.
So the resistance in “resisting entropy” has to be designed in. Intentionally. By a coach.
That’s the job. Not chasing peaks the body can’t reach anymore. Not selling the fantasy that 60 is the new 30. Just designing the right physical resistance, week after week, so the slope stays as flat as possible.
Watch the Full Class on LearnRx
Resisting Entropy is this month’s featured class on LearnRx, the education platform built for fitness coaches who want to deepen their practice and deliver better results for the clients they actually have, including the ones in the third phase of life.