Is aging a number, a feeling or an inevitable biologic process we can't alter? Much of what we know about the aging process has come from studying sedentary people. The problems typically attributed to aging have less to do with actual aging than the sedentary way that more than 70% of people in this country choose to spend their lives. This sedentary living results in 35 chronic diseases that kill more than 250,000 people a year in the US. This is many times more than any bacteria, spinach or bird flu out break… it is our couches that are not only aging us but killing us!

It occurred to me that in order to understand the true nature of musculoskeletal aging that we had to eliminate the variable of living a sedentary lifestyle… only this way could we answer the question of "What are our bodies really capable of if we aged the way we were designed for… actively?"

For this reason I started studying the Senior Olympians. This group of active agers consistently exhibit high levels of functional capacity and a high quality of life. I wanted to know why the 50 year old male winner of the mile sprint was capable of finishing in 4:34 or why the 70 year old winner still can blow away many sedentary people half their age by running a mile in 7 minutes.

I began looking at performance times of the top 8 finishers in every track distance from 100m to 10K from age 50 to 85 in the 2001 Senior Olympics. Would there be any kind of pattern to how we age? When does biology take over no matter how active we are?

What I found amazed me. Master's athletes' performance declined less than 2% per year for both men and women from age 50 to 75. This means that you could put a 50 year old and a 70 year old in the same race and no one gets lapped. This was true for the sprint distances as well as the endurance distances.

After 75 years old, however, something happens. The slow 2% decline in performance times suddenly becomes more than 8% decline per year. Why does performance plummet? Is it the cumulative factors of loss of muscle mass, flexibility, coordination or aerobic capacity that suddenly catch up with us?

To evaluate this effect further I looked at American Track and Field record holders… the bests of the best. From 30-50yo there is less than a 1% decline in performance. From 50-75 this increases to less than 2% and after 75 years old, there is again a sharp decrease in performance.

There are many reasons for these observations and maybe you have experienced them yourselves. In the next several blogs I want to talk about these reasons and how you can stay at the top of your game or race for as long as you can.

If you want to read the full study it will be coming out in March in the American Journal of Sports Medicine or is attached here as a PDF file.