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It gets better

You are never to old to start exercising

FIGHTING FIT Workout offers double whammy with age

Many people take it for granted that as they become older they will slow down and find it harder to exert themselves. But a new study suggests that the explanation for the slowdown may not be simple aging and that much of the loss can be erased with training. The report, in The Journal of the American College of Cardiology, says that part of the problem appears to be that older people use oxygen less efficiently when they exercise.

The researchers, led by Dr. J. Susie Woo of the University of Washington, found that the older people they looked at, in their 60s and 70s, used about a fifth more oxygen than younger study participants did when walking three and a half miles an hour.

For older people, it is a double whammy, said the senior author of the study, Dr. Wayne C. Levy, also of Washington.

To begin with, as hearts slow with age, they deliver less blood and oxygen to the body. But the authors of the new study found evidence that changes at a cellular level make the elderly use more oxygen to perform the same amount of work as the young. The encouraging news, however, is that much of this can be reversed with exercise.

When the researchers split volunteers into older and younger groups and had them walk or jog, bicycle and stretch for 90 minutes three times a week, the improvement was greater among the old than among the young.

"What was new and unexpected in our study," the authors wrote, "was the disproportionately greater response to training in the elderly subjects."

(NYT)

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