Midlife Athletes Don't Age

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Midlife Athletes Don’t Ageby T. G. Rand

If you find yourself overwhelmed by studies telling you how, how much or how little to exercise, then you need Bob Wiswell, the man who heads the exercise physiology department at the University of Southern California.

Wiswell has made a career of studying older athletes. Not professional athletes, but amateurs like himself — a fitness buff and sports enthusiast who plays basketball and softball regularly. For the past 14 years, he’s been conducting a study in which he and his staff look at the ways in which vigorously active men and women, who are over 40, age.

Vigorous exercise at midlife is proving to be a powerful age buster.

It’s not too late to start even if you’re over 40.

Midlife athletes have the aerobic capacity, cholesterol level and muscle tone of college-age adults.

And what he’s found is that many of them don’t age — at least not the way you’d expect. The men have average body fat percentages of 15 percent; the women have about 21 percent body fat.

Those are numbers you’d expect to see in college-age people. Cholesterol levels are low, blood pressure is low; aerobic capacity is high.

Wiswell’s athletes are people like physicians, dentists, lawyers, who are dedicated to sports such as swimming, running, cycling — in one case, even swing dancing.

Among the 250 people he’s examined in minute detail (treadmill tests, bone density scans and muscle biopsies are among the tools he uses), are a 90-year-old swimmer and a 66-year-old ultra-distance runner.

The first question you’d want to ask Wiswell is: What makes these people so special? Do they have some genetic protection against aging?

“That’s not a question I can answer with certainty,” he says, “but my personal opinion is, no — the genetic factor is probably not the decisive one in these people.’” For one thing, he notes, the majority of the men and women in his study were, if anything, exceptionally unathletic for the early part of their lives.

“The average age of my study participants is 51 years old, and the average years they’ve been training is about 10.” That means, on average, the majority was not particularly active for the first 40 years of their lives. It also means that the remarkable benefits they’ve accrued have come from lifestyle changes they implemented in recent years.Page:How do they do it?