Regular exercise may keep your body 30 years 'younger' All of us are aging every second, of course, which leads many of us also to be deeply interested in what we can expect from our bodies
The muscles of older men and women who have exercised for decades are indistinguishable in many ways from those of healthy 25-year-olds, according to an uplifting new study of a group of active septuagenarians.These men and women also had much higher aerobic capacities than most people their age, the study showed, making them biologically about 30 years younger than their chronological ages, the study’s authors concluded. All of us are aging every second, of course, which leads many of us also to be deeply interested in what we can expect from our bodies and health as those seconds — and subsequent years and decades — mount. Worryingly, statistics and simple observation suggest that many elderly people experience frailty, illness and dependence.
But science has not established whether and to what extent such physical decline is inevitable with age or if it is at least partially a byproduct of our modern lifestyles and perhaps amenable to change.There have been hints, though, that physical activity might alter how we age. Recent studies have found that older athletes have healthier muscles, brains, immune systems and hearts than people of the same age who are sedentary. But many of these studies have concentrated on competitive masters athletes, not people who exercise recreationally, and few have included many women.So for the new study, which was published in August in the Journal of Applied Physiology, researchers at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, decided to look at a distinctive set of older men and women. “We were very interested in people who had started exercising during the running and exercise booms of the 1970s,” says Scott Trappe, the director of the Human Performance Laboratory at Ball State and the new study’s senior author. That era
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