September 2026
By Al Noone · Last updated September 11, 2026
A colleague told me recently that he doesn't have any fitness goals. I think what he meant is that he doesn't obsess over how he looks or any particular performance metrics. But he looks forward every winter to a ski trip with his son. For that to be enjoyable, or doable at all, he has to maintain a certain level of fitness.
After a tough swim workout last winter, a lifeguard asked me what I was training for. I said “life.” It's not for any sort of competitive event. Swimming is something I enjoy for the discipline of developing efficient technique, the exercise of breathing and managing exertion, how it makes me feel afterwards, and how it complements the biking I do: it lengthens my spine, builds upper body strength, and gives my legs a rest.
It seems to me that there's a common view that people who exercise must be training for something like a competition. I think that's strange. There are good reasons to exercise that don't involve chasing a personal best, a transformed physique, or a competitive win. Just to maintain or marginally improve flexibility, strength, balance, endurance, and posture are reasons enough.
Another misconception, or at least one that behavior at the U.S. population level suggests is commonly held, is that by doing barely any exercise, people can maintain a stable state of fitness and health. As in, if you've never had the habit of exercise and have been healthy enough so far, you'll maintain that same level of health if you continue not to exercise.
But the body tends to break down and fall apart with time. Some amount of exercise is needed just to maintain a stable state. After age 30, adults can lose about 3 to 8 percent of their muscle mass per decade if they don't consistently stimulate their muscles through strength training or physical activity. Aerobic capacity (VO2 max) declines about 10 percent per decade after age 30 too, although regular training can roughly halve the rate of decline.
Age-related declines in fitness are so gradual that they can sneak up on you. But the losses that come with inactivity compound. By the time you notice something has changed, a lot probably has.
None of this is breaking news to exercise scientists. It doesn't come up in conversation for most people. Aging is so gradual that it's easy to ignore and put off. Behavior suggests there's a belief that rest has a neutral effect on the body. It doesn't. At a certain point in life, doing nothing is a choice with physiological consequences, just as surely as doing something is.
The word maintenance tends to suggest some ease: you've arrived somewhere, and now you just have to keep it up. But maintaining fitness in middle age and beyond is not passive. You can't just coast. It requires action.
The good news is that a level of action that has a meaningful effect on strength and cardio is attainable. Better to get on it sooner though, because regaining lost fitness is tougher than maintaining fitness in the first place.
My colleague with the annual ski trip doesn't need to optimize. He needs to stay functional, strong enough that a week of skiing is fun rather than an ordeal. It's a reasonable standard. But there's still commitment required to meet it.
Research published in Motivation and Emotion in 2023 found that maintenance is the dominant mode of goal pursuit for most adults, and yet it barely appears in the scientific literature. When participants reported the goals behind their previous week's activities, maintenance goals were more common than approach goals, avoidance goals, or having no goal at all, and yet motivation research has historically focused almost entirely on goals that involve change: losing weight, gaining strength, running faster.
The oversight matters practically. If the language we have for fitness goals is all about transformation, we're going to leave a lot of people without a frame for what they're actually doing and why. Someone who exercises to stay able to play with his grandchildren, or to keep skiing with his son, or to manage the rate at which he becomes someone his younger self wouldn't recognize, doesn't fit neatly into transformation language. But his goal is real. It has real physiological stakes. And once it's recognized, it can be planned around.
Making those maintenance goals explicit tends not to happen. The implicit goal stays implicit until something disrupts it: an injury, a season where you fell off your routine and the skiing felt harder, a lab result with a concerning number. Then a goal becomes visible, when the challenge of achieving it is bigger.
Making a maintenance goal explicit earlier is not about adding pressure. It's being honest and facing reality. What do you actually want your body to be able to do in five years, in ten? Who do you want to keep up with? What would you not want to have to give up? The answers to those questions are goals, even if they don't look like goals, and naming them is the first step toward doing anything about them.
The fitness industry's preferred customer is someone who wants to be transformed. There's money in transformation: before and after, programs and challenges, the drama of change. Maintenance is less photogenic. It doesn't make for a compelling ad.
But maintenance is what most people actually want, and for people in middle age and beyond, busy with all sorts of responsibilities, it's a big enough goal. Gracefully managing the gradual decline that inevitably comes with age, and extending your ability to do the things you love doing, are worthy ambitions. They require committed, consistent action. If naming that ambition, and having a program built around it, is useful to you, that's what Xenos Fit is for.
My colleague doesn't have fitness goals, he told me. Actually, he does.
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