People in their early 20s who regularly did resistance exercise
People in their early 20s who did NOT regularly do resistance exercise
People in their late 60s who regularly did resistance exercise
People in their late 60s who did NOT regularly do resistance exercise
Importantly, the researchers did not tightly define “resistance exercise.” The resistance exercisers included people who lifted weights, who used machines, who used resistance bands, and who did body weight exercises. They included people who did long workouts and people who did short workups. They included people who did intense workouts and people who did more leisurely workouts. The only requirement to be defined as a resistance exerciser was to self-report doing at least two sessions per week of some kind of resistance training for at least six months.
That’s really important because it suggests that the results are widely applicable to all sorts of “normal” people (i.e. not just professional athletes or bodybuilders) living in real world conditions. In other words, if you are just an average person who goes to the gym a few times per week to try to maintain your health, these results probably apply to you. This is in contrast to many other studies, in which the participants are engaging in a very structured and intense program that may well produced great results, but which many ordinary folks leading busy lives would not be easily able to consistently replicate.
The researchers took all of the participants and put them through a battery of tests which included a body composition scan and various tests of functional fitness, such as hand grip strength (which has previously been shown to be a good predictor of longevity), walking speed, and tests of leg strength.
The results? Not surprisingly, all of the people in their early 20s did pretty well. The exercisers got the best results, but the non-exercisers were pretty close behind.
Also perhaps not surprisingly, the people in their late 60s who didn’t exercise did poorly.
But the awesome finding was that the people in their 60s who did exercise regularly performed almost as well as the people in their early 20s. In fact, by some measures the older folks who exercised outperformed the younger folks who didn’t exercise.
The takeaway: doing regular strength exercise can help somebody in their late 60s be almost as fit as someone in their early 20s. Or, put another way, if you are in your late 60s and exercise regularly, your biological age will be closer to someone in their 20s than to someone your own age who doesn’t exercise.
