If you track information on aging and fitness…and if you’re here, you maybe do…you are probably frustrated by the research summaries that begin with: “1,000 volunteers, aged 25-30…”

Our wholly unsubstantiated theory holds that fitness research focuses on younger people because much of it is funded—directly or indirectly—by shoe and apparel companies that see free-spending young people as their core client base. By underscoring the value of fitness, they will sell more of the latest model of technical wicking quarter-zip base layer something. The knock-on assumption is that old people aren’t as concerned about having the latest and greatest iteration of clothing, gear, etc. This is true. Before you try to dispute it, stop and look at yourself.

Again, there is no basis for this. Unsubstantiated. But these are days when the more cynical interpretations of things seem to be explanatory.

There are exceptions, though. Some studies look at aged athletes and many of them are swept up and related by the estimable Gretchen Reynolds in the New York Times.  Last December she summarized a study of “lifelong athletes and their thighs” that looked at runners in their 70s and 80s who had been at the sport for decades. The upshot—no surprise—was that the muscles of elderly athletes had a lot in common with 25-year-old athletes. Sedentary old people didn’t fare as well. Of particular interest: the “results suggest that long-term exercise may help aging muscles remain healthy in part by readying them to dissipate inflammation,” while “sedentary living seems to set up muscles to overreact to strain and remain inflamed, potentially leading to fewer muscular gains when someone does exercise.” Inflammation is also implicated in a host of other health problems.

This was a small study but the results were consistent with other research pointing to the benefits of exercise for healthy aging. If you want a study that looked at lots of people, Reynolds more recently summarized research on the muscles and heart health of several thousand men and women in and around Athens, Greece during their middle age.

Penultimate takeaway: the men who started the study with the most muscle were the least likely to develop heart disease over the following ten years. (Because women develop heart disease later in life, very few had any disease within the first ten years so a similar beneficial effect of muscle mass wasn’t observable.) Top takeaway: “for men, having relatively large amounts of muscle early in middle age dropped the risk of heart disease later by 81 percent.”

Let’s put a line under that: the risk of heart disease dropped by 81 percent.

That’s a big number. Before getting overly excited, everyone should be asking for another study that might replicate those results. Right now there’s not a handy explanation on what the mechanism is; maybe it’s just an association and nothing causal. But, assuming results are confirmed and point to a cause-and-effect, someone needs to tell us how much mass we need to get those results and how to get that muscle mass. And—critically—how to preserve it despite the body’s inclination toward muscle atrophy over time. We should have a metric that can be measured and is measured and tracked like your diastolic blood pressure.

We should have a number. ASAP.

Image of Trevi Fountain by Dietmar Rabich / Wikimedia Commons / “Rome (IT), Trevi-Brunnen — 2013 — 3600” / CC BY-SA 4.0