About

Fit Over Forty is a blog about staying in decent shape when you did not start yesterday.

Most fitness writing assumes a reader with time, an uncomplicated body and nothing else to do that day. What actually changes in your forties is not your capacity so much as your margin for error. Recovery takes longer. A bad week costs more. The things that worked at twenty-five stop working without announcing it.

So this is a log rather than a programme. Two of us write it, neither of us is a coach, and nothing here is prescribed. It is what we tried, what happened, and what we would do differently.

Four kinds of fitness

Everything here sits under one of four headings. The physical one is what people write about, and it is usually the first thing to fail when the other three are neglected.

• Physical Fitness — training, recovery, and the equipment that survived contact with real life.
• Mental Fitness — attention, sleep, and what we have been reading.
• Emotional Fitness — the part nobody puts in a training plan.
• Financial Fitness — planning far enough ahead that the next thirty years stay a choice.

What this is not

It is not medical advice, and we are not qualified to give any. If something hurts, or you are starting again after an injury or an illness, talk to someone who can examine you. We write about what we did; you know things about your own body that we do not.

If we mention a product it is because we used it. Usually that means we bought it; occasionally somebody sends us one free. Either way you get an honest account of how we got on with it, including when the answer is that it was a waste of money.

Any post carrying affiliate links, or writing about something we were given, will say so at the top, before you read it. If you use an affiliate link we get a small cut at no extra cost to you; if you would rather not, don't — we won't be offended, and the write-up says the same either way.

No adverts and no sponsors for the time being. We may change our minds about that, and if we do you will read it here rather than have to work it out. There is no third-party analytics on these pages either — the privacy notice sets out exactly what is and is not collected.

Keeping in touch

New posts go out by email, and only if you confirm the address first. You can also subscribe by RSS, or send us an email — we read everything, even when it takes us a while to answer.