I Used to Be Fit. Here's My Honest Reset at 44.

Let me tell you about the body I had at 34.

I ran a half marathon that year. I cycled to work twice a week — not fast, but consistently. I could do twenty pull-ups without thinking about it. My back did not have opinions. I ate more or less what I wanted and my weight stayed in the same rough postcode year on year.

I am telling you this not to brag about someone who no longer exists, but to establish the baseline from which I have since diverged.

My body at 44 has opinions. About running. About pull-ups. About what happens if I have two consecutive nights of bad sleep and then try to play forty-five minutes of football with Ellie in the garden. My lower back, specifically, has developed a personality. It is not a pleasant personality.

The good news — and there is good news, which is not something I would have predicted when I was limping away from a very moderate attempt at Parkrun two years ago — is that I am in better shape now than I was at 42. Not 34-shape. But a shape that functions reliably and doesn't cost me three days to recover from a long walk.

This is what I did.

What I stopped doing

Running first, because running is what I tried when I finally acknowledged that the situation required intervention, and running is what broke me before I found an approach that worked.

The problem with running after 40 — or rather, with returning to running after a long absence in your early forties — is that your cardiovascular system recovers faster than your connective tissue. You feel fine while you're doing it. Then your knees file a formal complaint approximately twelve hours later. The complaint is difficult to ignore and does not respond well to "but I used to do this all the time."

I also stopped treating gym sessions as things that needed to be long. I had a long-held belief that a workout under 45 minutes was barely worth doing. This belief was causing me to skip workouts entirely because I didn't have 45 minutes and then feel guilty about the skipping. I replaced it with a different belief, based on evidence: a 20-minute session done four times a week produces better results than a 50-minute session done once, especially after 40 when recovery costs are higher and consistency matters more than volume.

What I started doing

Strength training with a kettlebell. Two kettlebells, actually — a 16kg and a 24kg. They live in the corner of the home office next to the monitor stand. The 16kg cost about £30 second-hand. The 24kg cost about £45. These are, proportional to the return on investment, the best things I have bought in the last three years.

The research on resistance training after 40 is persuasive and consistent: it preserves muscle mass, supports bone density, regulates testosterone, improves insulin sensitivity, and — perhaps most relevantly for someone who spends a lot of time sitting at a desk — strengthens the posterior chain in a way that stops the lower back from filing personality-based complaints. I do swings, goblet squats, single-arm presses, and carries. Not every day. Four times a week, twenty minutes, the sessions that happen in the window between the school run and opening the laptop.

Walking. Already covered in the tiredness piece, but worth repeating here: walking is not a consolation prize for people who can't run. It is a genuinely useful physical intervention that has no injury cost and a measurable impact on cortisol, mood, and cardiovascular health. I walk every day. Sometimes it's twenty minutes, sometimes it's an hour. It is the most sustainable thing in this list.

Zone 2 cardio. This is the exercise science term for low-intensity aerobic work — the kind where you can hold a conversation, where your heart rate is elevated but not strained. Cycling on a stationary bike while listening to a podcast. A brisk walk with inclines. Thirty minutes two or three times a week. It is profoundly boring and profoundly effective. It is the kind of exercise that a 44-year-old body is much better adapted to than the kind that involves sprinting.

The practical question: when

If you are reading this with two small children and a job and a slightly incredulous expression, I understand. The "when" is the real problem.

My answer is: 6:15am before anyone is awake, or in the home office at lunch. Not both. Not every day. But consistently enough that it is a pattern rather than an exception.

The 6:15am slot exists because Ellie reliably wakes at 6:45 and Sam at 7. This gives me a reliable 30-minute window that belongs, structurally, to no one else. I resented setting the alarm earlier for approximately two weeks and then stopped resenting it because the alternative — sacrificing the window to lie there feeling vaguely anxious — turned out to be worse.

The honest update

I am not going to pretend I have solved this. I have a sustainable routine that works most weeks and falls apart when Sam is ill or we have visitors or a project deadline collides with a bad run of sleep. When it falls apart I start again the following week without the self-recrimination I used to add to the pile.

What I have stopped expecting is a return to 34. That body was a different product, running on different firmware. What I am building now is something slower, more deliberate, and — I think — more appropriate to a 44-year-old man with two small children who needs to still be functional at 62.

The lower back has stopped filing complaints. For now, that feels like victory.