Physical abilities decline with age but most people assume this will not happen until much later in life.
A new study shows that fitness and strength start to decrease around age 35 even when people exercise regularly. After this point the decline continues and speeds up as people get older.
This process may be impossible to stop completely but people still have some control over it. Physical activity might not prevent the initial decline but it can slow down how quickly abilities worsen according to the research.
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The aging process causes skeletal muscle to gradually weaken. For some people this becomes noticeable in their 60s and can affect their ability to move around easily.
Studies of elite athletes have demonstrated that physical performance usually reaches its highest point around age 30 despite ongoing training. This indicates that the biological processes responsible for muscle loss with age begin working long before the effects become obvious or cause medical problems.
Studying physical abilities in athletes has some benefits because data is easy to find & their lifestyles are not affected by inactivity. However the authors point out an obvious problem with this approach. Elite athletes are not typical of most people. The researchers wanted to measure physical capacity in regular people from their teenage years through old age.
They designed a population-based study that followed the same individuals over many years. Most research in this area has used cross-sectional studies that look at people at just one moment in time. Studies that track people over long periods can show how things change as time passes.
The team analyzed information from the Swedish Physical Activity and Fitness cohort study. This study has tracked several hundred people in Sweden since 1974 when they were sixteen years old. The study collected strength and fitness measurements from these individuals at five different times over the past fifty years. The participants were tested at ages 16 27, 34, 52 and 63. This created a rare chance to see how physical abilities change across half a century.
Cross-sectional studies appear to have underestimated how much physical capacity declines with age according to the researchers. However their findings confirm existing evidence that this decline affects men and women in similar ways.
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For both sexes muscular endurance and estimated maximal aerobic capacity reached their highest point between ages 26 & 36. After that they gradually declined at first by 0.3 percent to 0.6 percent per year and later by up to 2.5 percent per year. The rate of decline was the same for both sexes.
Muscle power showed a difference between the sexes. Men peaked at age 27 while women peaked at age 19. After reaching their peak both men and women lost muscle power at similar rates. Initially it decreased by 0.2 percent to 0.5 percent per year and later increased to an annual decline of 2 percent or more. By age 63 participants had experienced an overall drop from their peak physical capacity ranging from 30 percent to 48 percent.
There is some good news though. While we cannot avoid or delay our physical decline we can slow it down with regular exercise according to the authors.
People who were physically active in their leisure time at age 16 maintained higher aerobic capacity along with better muscular endurance & muscle power throughout the observation period.
This shows why it is important to promote physical activity to teenagers & young adults. But that message applies regardless of your age. Participants who became more active in adulthood still managed to improve their physical capacity by around 10 percent according to the study.
It is never too late to start exercising. Research shows that physical activity can slow down the decline in performance even if it cannot stop it completely. This is according to lead author Maria Westerståhl who works in the Department of Laboratory Medicine at the Karolinska Institute. The team will now look into why people reach their best performance at age 35 & why physical activity can reduce performance loss but not prevent it entirely. Westerståhl explains this in her recent findings.
