Some Excellent Predictors Of Longevity

By Jake Foster, PA

Life expectancy in the United States declined 2 years in a row in 2020 and 2021. This represents a pretty sharp downward drop in the years Americans are expected to live when viewed on a simple graph of lifespan. A major reason for this decline was the global pandemic. A lot of people died during those couple of terrible years. One thing covid did was sort of expose a delicate line that a lot of people were edging up against when it comes to health; in general, people tended to be more sick and have a higher risk of dying of the virus if their overall health was poor or deconditioned. Chronic conditions that plague us as Americans tended to increase the risk of getting really sick from this respiratory infection. But these chronic conditions are what have killed us the most over the years leading up to covid, and will continue to kill more Americans than anything else. These conditions include heart disease, lung disease and liver disease, among others. These are conditions that tend to build up over years and decades.

I am very interested in thinking about these chronic conditions for the main purpose of increasing our HEALTHSPAN, which may in turn increase our LIFESPAN and overall quality of life, especially in our later years after retirement. It turns out that there are some very good predictors of how much quality of life you will have as you age, as well as how long you will live in general.

The predictors

VO2 max. This describes the maximum amount of oxygen that a person can use during exercise. It is a simple way to see how well your heart and lungs can shuttle oxygen around to the tissues in your body. The higher this amount, the better a person’s cardiovascular fitness is.

Grip strength. Pretty self explanatory; it’s just a measure of how much force a person can generate with squeezing their hand.

Leg strength. Also easy to think about; its just how strong the muscles in the legs are.

Balance. This is another way to think about mobility; how well we can move in general, and how at risk for a fall we are.

Muscle mass. This is a measure of how big your muscles are.

Muscle Power. This is a measure of how much force you muscles can generate. Big muscles don’t always mean bigger force.

These six things are a fantastic insight into a person’s overall health, and can be used to predict how long a LIFESPAN someone will have. But these things also can tell us about our HEALTHSPAN, which I like to define as the quality of life we can enjoy while we are actually alive.

Here’s the cool thing about these six things: they are relatively easy to measure. Also, I think it could be argued that improving these 6 things in ourselves will undoubtedly improve our overall quality of life, and how we feel about our bodies.

Want to know what’s even more cool? All six of these things are trainable. We can improve all of these things if we put in a little work. And it doesn’t matter when you start. Studies have shown that all of these things can be improved with training, no matter how old you are. Notice I said “trainable.” I personally don’t want to use the word “exercise” any more when I approach my workouts. I want to “TRAIN.” I use this kind of language because we really ought to have specific goals when it comes to our physical conditioning. “Exercise” is all well and good, but are you really getting benefit from it? Rather, I want to be able to answer this question every day: “What am I training for today?” These six measures of longevity all require a slightly different approach if we want to improve them specifically. So, unfortunately, the “exercise” we all get when we are doing our daily jobs, or cleaning the house, or just moving through the day….these things just won’t count for appropriate “training.” Don’t get me wrong, all movement is beneficial and will probably capture some sort of benefit in at least one of those categories. But what we really need to do is train them each individually.

I won’t get into the details here, but in short we should get at least 150 minutes a week of some sort of cardiovascular exercise where you are a bit out of breath while you do it, and yes, probably sweat a little bit. We should also safely lift some heavy weights 3 times a week. And we should stretch and think about our mobility at least a couple of times a week as well.

If we improve these 6 measurable, trainable points in our health, we will certainly improve our LIFESPAN, but more importantly, we will improve our HEALTHSPAN, and find a much higher quality of life as we all wander around on planet earth through the coming decades.