Heart and Muscle Health?  Get Moving!

"There are clearly benefits at all levels [of activity]."
"The most encouraging is you don't have to be a super athlete, and it's never too late."
Soren Brage, principal investigator MRC Epidemiology Unit, University of Cambridge

"Older individuals get heart failure not because their hearts stop pumping well, but because the hearts become hard and stiff."
"There's no medication that treats that problem [prevention is key]."
Benjamin Levine, director, Institute for Exercise and Environmental Medicine, Dallas

 Aging.com

Researchers who looked at the activity levels of 315,059 study participants from age 50 to 71 at four stations in their lives; from age 15 to 18; 19 to 29; 35 to 39, and 40 to 61, found that those who had been inactive but went on to increase physical activity in later adulthood -- 40 to 61 -- to four to seven hours weekly, ended up with a 35 percent lower mortality risk as compared to those who were inactively sedentary all their lives and remained that way.

The study results, published in JAMA Network Open, found those individuals already active and continuing with their exercise levels into later adulthood came out with a 29 to 36 percent lower risk of early mortality. What was instructive and useful was the understanding that older adults who maintained exercise levels along with older adults who had newly taken up exercise both experienced comparable conclusions.

Adults -- researchers discovered -- with cardiovascular disease and cancer, gained substantial longevity benefits when they became more active, irrespective of their past physical activity levels, and those who had been inactive at the beginning, yet increased to an average of thirty minutes of moderate exercise daily, gained an approximate 24 percent lower mortality risk.

Aging.com

What the research indicated was that irregardless of a participant's body mass index, blood pressure or cholesterol, benefits were attained. Specifically, health benefits of beginning to exercise later in life, affected the heart and muscles beneficially. A study of 61 healthy, but sedentary adults of age 45 to 64 by the American Heart Association, found in 2018 that participants who began exercising reversed cardiovascular effects of sedentary aging.

In that age category, those people who took up exercising indicated a 25 percent improvement in elasticity of the left ventricular muscle of the heart, the heart chamber responsible for pumping blood to the rest of the body. The cardiac stiffness linked to sedentary aging was prevented through exercise restoring heart elasticity.

Exercise training has a best-before date for effectiveness which represents that period before the onset of late-middle age -- since heart stiffening begins at that point. Before attaining age 65, while the heart retains plasticity, exercise training as a maintenance preventive therapy must be well in place.

"Master athletes", representing men between age 60 and 80 whose  high-level endurance training at least twice weekly for a minimum of 20 years were compared by researchers from the University of Birmingham to men of the same age who had no regular workout routine. Published in Frontiers in Physiology this year, the study concluded both groups held an equal capacity to build muscle, related to their exercise.

Aging.com