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| Fitness and Age |
While it is generally true that fitness level decline with age after about age thirty-five, it
is not an absolute. Getting older does not necessitate feeling older, losing strength and vitality,or limiting physical activities. Most people know someone aged seventy or older who continues o participate in physically challenging activities like weight lifting, bicycling, golf, tennis,
or jogging. For example, 75-year old body builder Ernestine Shepherd has made news worldwide with your lifestyle. Shepherd is in better shape than most people, decades her junior. Up at 3 a.m. every morning, she spends her days running, lifting weights and working out. She also works as a certified personal trainer at her gym.
There are a variety of prevalent age-related fitness myths, and Dr. Kenneth Cooper
exposes them in his book, Faith-Based Fitness. Many people believe exercising after age forty
is dangerous, but there is no support for this myth, as long as older continuing or beginning
exercisers have regular medical checkups. In fact, evidence shows that those who fail to exercise
are at greater risk than those who exercise regularly.
The average person loses between 30 - 40 percent of his muscle mass during his lifetime,
but the reason is because most people become less active and less fit as they age. It is commonly
thought that increasing muscle mass after age sixty is impossible, but muscle can be added at any
age with strength training. Cooper teaches that strength training leads to significant increases in
muscle size and strength and in functional mobility, even among nursing home residents up to
ninety-six years old. Likewise, people who engage in regular endurance exercise can maintain a
high aerobic capacity from age forty to about age seventy. It is only in the seventies and eighties
that older athletes normally begin to experience declines in aerobic ability, but even at late ages,
those who continue to train can remain remarkably fit.
Myths may be more about laziness than age-related fears. Research shows that people as
old as one hundred can dramatically increase their strength, improve their balance, restore bone
density, moderate diabetes, and diminish joint pain in just a few weeks of weight training. The
minute a person starts sweating, whether he is twenty or ninety, he elevates his heart rate, his
arteries get more flexible, and his blood pressure is lowered, thereby lowering the risk of heart
disease and stroke. For hours after exercise, bodies are more sensitive to insulin, keeping sugar
levels in check and reducing the risk of diabetes.
Herschel Walker is a great, modern example of the myths of age’s affect on fitness.
Walker won the 1982 Heisman Trophy (presented annually to the top college football player in
America) and was a world class sprinter at the University of Georgia from 1980– 1982. He
played professional football from 1983-1997, and competed in the 1992 Winter Olympics as a
bobsledder.76 On January 30, 2010, at age forty-seven, Walker competed in his first professional
Mixed Martial Arts fight. Critics ridiculed him for entering the sport at such an advanced age,
and concerns for his health were daily topics on national sports shows. Despite all the negativity,
Walker knocked out twenty-six year old Greg Nagy in a dominating performance.
Because of his age, Walker had to endure a battery of tests to be sanctioned to fight.
Allen Fields, chief physician for the Florida Boxing Commission that also oversees MMA
sanctioning, said that not only did Walker pass the most strenuous of all medical athletic tests,
but he produced the highest cardiac stress test score of anyone ever tested by his facility. Fields
said that Walker was in “as fine a shape as Muhammad Ali or any of these people we’ve had the care of.
This guy is 47 going on 22, as far as his physical fitness goes.”78 Like all world class
athletes, Walker is an anomaly. But unlike most world class athletes, Walker has maintained his
fitness as he has aged. Mike Tyson and Bo Jackson are contemporaries of Walker, and at this
stage of their lives, they look like any other middle-aged, overweight man. Everyone has the
choice to age like Walker, or to age like Tyson and Jackson.
