Slowing down and developing a thickened girth used to be an accepted side effect of getting on a bit. Not any more. Britain’s grey army is limbering, toning and speeding up like never before and represents the fastest growing sector of the fitness industry. Around one in 10 Britons age 55-64 and one in 20 over-65s are now members of gym or health clubs, while many more keep fit by exercising regularly.
The majority of first-time triathletes are over 40 too. Encouraged by evidence that exercise prolongs life, wards off killer diseases and prevents mental decline, older people cannot, apparently, get enough of working out.
While exercise is good for everyone, it is, apparently, even better for older people and in Britain, 32% of the population – 18.6 million people – is over 50. The number is expected to rise to 23.8 million by 2012. A recent study by the University of Washington found that, of former couch potatoes, those aged 65-79 who jogged or cycled for half an hour three times a week experienced a 30% rise in how effectively their bodies use energy) compared with a 2% rise in those aged 20-33.
Researchers are also convinced that getting older is not a barrier to staying super fit. “Studies have shown that the lung capacity and cardiovascular fitness of people in their 50s and 60s is no worse than when they were in their 30s and 40s,” saya Ceri Diss, a sport scientist at Roehampton University, Surrey, who is researching the effects of age on running performance. “Aerobic ability remains pretty constant provided someone stays active,” she says. When 60-70-year-old men and women ran for 45 minutes on four days a week, one study recently found that their aerobic capacity increased by 24% in less than a year. However, flexibility and elasticity, which affect power and speed, do deteriorate with age.
But age is no bar to marathon runners. Around 4,000 of those who finished last Sunday’s London event were over 40. Previous winners include Joyce Smith, the first woman across the finishing line in the first London marathon in 1981, aged 43; she repeated her victory the following year. Two years ago, at 92, Fauja Singh a world-record breaking marathon runner in his age group, from Ilford, Essex, signed a deal with Adidas to co-front a major advertising campaign featuring David Beckham and rugby player Jonny Wilkinson. Singh had only taken up running 11 years earlier. You don’t have to run to be fit, though. Penny Hilling is far more limber at 80 than many people a quarter of her age who attend the yoga class she teaches in Leighton Buzzard. “A lot of it is down to attitude,” she says.
A study of marathon runners published two years ago in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, written by Professor Peter Jokl, an orthopaedic surgeon at Yale University School of Medicine, analysed the finishing times of 415,000 runners in the New York marathon between 1983 and 1999. Finishers in the older age groups had improved more markedly than younger runners. In the 60-68 age group, women ran an average four minutes faster each year. It confirms, Jokl says, that “you can maintain a very high performance into the sixth or seventh decade of life.” It also adds weight to the theory that a lot of people grow weaker not because of age, but because they don’t use their muscles.
Whichever activity you choose, there will be benefits to your waistline, blood pressure and self-esteem. Walking, skipping and climbing stairs are especially good for building bone density, which weakens with age (and lack of weight-bearing activity) in both men and women. Or why not try weight training? Sports scientists at Texas University found that weight training for six months improved the sleep quality as well as fitness levels of 70-80 year-olds by an average 38%.
Ultimately, though, any activity is better than nothing. In last month’s Journal of Aging and Health, researchers at the University of South Florida divided volunteers with an average age of 84 into three groups. One group exercised by walking, the second did weight training and the third group did no exercise. After four months both of the exercise groups had lower blood pressure, improved body strength, better flexibility and higher scores in tests of balance and coordination compared with their sedentary counterparts. That then is the message: it doesn’t matter what you do, just as long as you do something.
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