What Noah Ohlsen’s Masters Games Victory Teaches Us About Training After 35

For more than a decade, Noah Ohlsen trained and competed against the best athletes in CrossFit. He qualified for the CrossFit Games year after year, finished second in the world in 2019, and remained one of the most consistent athletes of his generation.

In 2026, Ohlsen entered a different stage of his career. At 35, he became eligible for the Masters division. He didn’t just show up and rely on the fitness he’d already built. He won the 35-39 division at the Masters CrossFit Games and earned his first CrossFit Games championship.

But the most useful part of his story isn’t simply that he won. It’s what changed in his training along the way.

In an interview with Red Bull, Ohlsen explained that training in his 30s has required him to cut back on volume. He still trains hard. He is still capable of performing at a level most athletes will never reach. The difference is that he no longer treats more work as automatically better work.

That’s a lesson a lot of Masters athletes need to hear.

You Do Not Need to Stop Training Hard

The worst interpretation of Masters training is that athletes should suddenly avoid heavy weights, intense conditioning, Olympic lifts, gymnastics, and anything else that looks difficult.

Turning 35 or 40 doesn’t make you fragile. It doesn’t mean your best training is behind you. Plenty of athletes continue building strength, improving skills, and setting personal records well into their 40s and beyond.

The goal isn’t to remove intensity. The goal is to become more deliberate about where that intensity is placed and how much additional fatigue surrounds it.

There’s a major difference between a productive hard session and simply accumulating more work. A heavy squat progression can make you stronger. A well-designed interval session can improve your engine. A gymnastics strength session can build capacity. Adding another metcon because you feel like you haven’t suffered enough doesn’t automatically improve any of those things.

At some point, the extra work stops adding to the result and starts interfering with your ability to recover from the work that matters.

Noah Ohlsen Has Already Built the Base

There’s an important piece of context here. Noah Ohlsen isn’t a typical 35-year-old athlete. He’s spent more than a decade developing elite strength, conditioning, skill, and work capacity.

When an athlete like Ohlsen reduces his volume, he’s maintaining and refining an enormous base that already exists. That’s different from a recreational athlete who trains three times a week and assumes doing even less will produce the same result.

This is why “train less” is incomplete advice. Some athletes do need less volume. Others need more consistent training. Many need a better distribution of the volume they’re already doing.

The correct amount isn’t the smallest amount you can get away with. It’s the amount you can recover from while continuing to improve.

For Masters athletes, that amount may change as the years pass. Your ability to work hard can remain extremely high, but your tolerance for poorly planned volume may decrease. You can still attack a difficult workout. You may simply need more time before you’re ready to attack another one.

Recovery Has to Be Programmed

Most athletes think of recovery as something that happens after the program is written. They train as much as possible, then try to fix the resulting fatigue with sleep, supplements, stretching, massage guns, or a day off when their body finally forces them to take one.

A better program manages fatigue before it becomes a problem.

That doesn’t mean every other day has to be easy. It means hard sessions, lower-intensity work, strength training, and recovery are arranged so they support one another. The week shouldn’t feel like five unrelated tests of how much discomfort you can tolerate.

Our eight-week Masters Strength & Conditioning Program averages about three traditional high-intensity workouts per week. Outside of those sessions, athletes still train. They build their aerobic engine with Zone 2 work and structured intervals. They develop muscle through supersets and bodybuilding-style strength work. They practice Olympic lifting and gymnastics. They improve mobility through movements that challenge usable positions instead of treating mobility as a separate ten-minute chore that’s easy to skip.

The volume has a purpose. So does the restraint.

What Actually Changes as a Masters Athlete?

CrossFit labels athletes as Masters beginning at 35, but the body doesn’t fall off a cliff on your thirty-fifth birthday. Aging is gradual, and training history matters. A well-trained 42-year-old may outperform a sedentary 25-year-old in nearly every measure of fitness. Even among athletes of the same age, years of training, injury history, sleep, nutrition, work stress, and genetics create very different starting points.

Still, aging does affect performance. Research on Masters athletes shows that physical capacity eventually declines even among people who continue training. The important detail is that all qualities don’t decline at the same rate.

Muscle power appears to decline earlier and faster than maximal strength. Power is the ability to produce force quickly. It’s what allows an athlete to accelerate, jump, sprint, change direction, and move a barbell explosively. A review published in Clinical Geriatric Medicine described muscle power as declining more rapidly with age than strength and identified it as an important predictor of physical function.

This matters in CrossFit because so much of the sport depends on power. Olympic lifts, box jumps, wall balls, sprinting, and fast changes of direction all require more than the ability to produce force. They require the athlete to produce it quickly.

The answer isn’t to stop moving fast because you’re getting older. It’s to continue training strength and power while you still have them.

Strength Is One of the Qualities Worth Protecting

Research on Masters athletes has found that performance in strength-dependent events can show some of the greatest declines with advancing age. That doesn’t mean the decline is unavoidable or that older athletes can’t get stronger. It means strength deserves a deliberate place in the program instead of being left to whatever stimulus happens to appear in the day’s metcon.

Continued resistance training can preserve a remarkable amount of physical capacity. A 2025 review of heavy strength training in older adults found that healthy older adults can benefit from heavy and very heavy resistance training. Another randomized trial followed adults around retirement age and found that one year of heavy resistance training helped preserve leg strength several years later.

Those studies involved older populations, not 35-year-old CrossFit competitors, but the larger point still applies: aging isn’t a reason to move away from meaningful strength work. It’s one of the strongest reasons to keep it.

The same is true for muscle. Age-related losses in muscle mass and strength become more important later in life, but they don’t suddenly begin when CrossFit moves your name onto a Masters leaderboard. Training gives us a chance to fight that decline long before it threatens performance or independence.

Recovery Is More Complicated Than “Older Athletes Recover Slower”

It’s common to say that every older athlete recovers more slowly. The research isn’t quite that simple. A 2023 review of recovery from resistance exercise in older adults found that the available studies were limited and inconsistent. Some measures showed slower recovery in older adults, some showed no meaningful difference, and a few showed faster recovery. The authors concluded that there wasn’t enough evidence to make one universal claim based on age alone.

That’s important because Masters programming shouldn’t be built on the assumption that everyone over 40 is fragile. At the same time, real athletes know that recovery is affected by more than muscle soreness in a laboratory. A 45-year-old may have children, a demanding job, old injuries, inconsistent sleep, and 15 years of training stress behind him. Two athletes can complete the same workout and have very different recoveries from it.

So the lesson isn’t that every Masters athlete needs the same automatic reduction in volume. The lesson is that recovery has to be observed and the program has to leave room for adjustment. Performance, soreness, motivation, sleep, and the ability to repeat quality efforts tell us more than age by itself.

What Noah’s Approach Really Tells Us

Noah cutting volume doesn’t mean he stopped doing difficult things. It means he became more selective about how much work he needed to prepare for competition.

He already had the strength. He already had the skills. He already had years of high-level conditioning behind him. His job was no longer to accumulate the largest possible amount of training. His job was to keep those qualities sharp, address what still needed improvement, and arrive at competition healthy enough to use them.

That’s the part everyday Masters athletes can apply. You may not have Noah’s training base, but you can stop measuring the quality of a program by how exhausted it leaves you. You can keep the heavy lifting, explosive work, intervals, gymnastics, and hard conditioning while removing work that has no clear purpose.

A productive training week doesn’t need five redline workouts. It needs enough hard work to create adaptation, enough lower-intensity work to build capacity, and enough recovery to let both of those things work.

How We Apply This to Masters Training

This is the reasoning behind our eight-week Masters Strength & Conditioning Program. It doesn’t replace real training with corrective exercises and easy workouts. It continues to develop strength, power, Olympic lifting, gymnastics, and conditioning, but it controls how those demands are distributed across the week.

The program averages about three traditional high-intensity workouts per week. Those sessions are supported by progressive strength work, Zone 2 conditioning, structured run and rowing intervals, bodybuilding-style accessories, and mobility built into the training. Athletes 55 and older receive additional adjustments to sets, distances, loads, and rest where the original volume may interfere with the intended stimulus.

The strength and speed work are there because those qualities matter as we age. The Zone 2 work and lower-volume days are there because not every session needs to empty the tank. The mobility work is integrated into squats, overhead positions, carries, gymnastics preparation, and our Happy Shoulders protocols because mobility should help you train, not exist as a separate routine you never complete.

None of this is about making Masters training easier. It’s about making the work productive enough to repeat, progress, and sustain.

The Goal Is to Keep Improving

Noah Ohlsen winning the Masters CrossFit Games is an extraordinary result, but the lesson behind it applies far beyond elite competition.

More isn’t always better. Less isn’t automatically smarter. The answer is the right amount of productive work, organized in a way that allows you to recover, adapt, and come back ready to train again.

Masters athletes still need strength. They still need intensity. They still need power, skill, muscle, mobility, and an aerobic engine. What they don’t need is meaningless volume added only to make the training feel harder.

That’s the idea behind our eight-week Masters Strength & Conditioning Program. It was written specifically for functional fitness athletes over 40, with tailored instructions for athletes 55 and older. It combines progressive strength work, Olympic lifting, gymnastics, bodybuilding-style accessories, mobility, Zone 2 training, intervals, and high-intensity conditioning in one complete plan.

You’re not training to prove that you can survive another week. You’re training to become stronger, move better, and keep performing for years to come.

Learn more about the Masters Strength & Conditioning Program

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