Health Farm

Everyone knows exercise is good for their health. Here’s a reason to keep exercising – and never stop. When your rheumy-eyed 70 year-old peers inch along on their walking frames, you’ll be flexing poolside in your finest posing pouch, putting 20 year-olds in the shade.

Researchers at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., have discovered that oldies who have exercised for decades have the muscles of healthy 20-year-olds, and a biological age about 30 years younger than their chronological age.

Comparing young and old

The study, published in the Journal of Applied Physiology, recruited men and women, now in their 70s, who took up exercise in their youth and stayed with the programme – running, cycling, swimming or otherwise working out – throughout the next 50 years.

They also recruited a second group of similarly-aged oldies who hadn’t exercised during adulthood, and a third group of active 20 year-olds – and hustled everyone into a lab where an army of bespectacled white coats measured aerobic capacity, muscle capillaries, and important enzymes.

Life-long exercisers win big

Well, what do you know – the muscles of the old exercisers resembled those of the young ones, with just as many capillaries and enzymes. And the muscles of the sedentary elderly – forgeddaboutit.

Active oldies don’t have quite the same puff as 20 year-olds, but they’re streets ahead – with 40% greater aerobic capacity – of their non-exercising elderly peers, who may as well have paper-bags for lungs.

What to make of this

Before you say, but we all get old and die, consider the quality of life you hope to lead in your 70s: living life from a walking frame, or your own well-muscled frame.

Physical decline as we age is inevitable – that law has not changed. But slowing the rate of physical deterioration – and extending our health span – is worth fighting for. In fact, getting older need not mean getting weaker, at least not until the very end.