“If there is anything close to a fountain of youth, it is exercise,” says Dr. Anne Fabiny, a geriatrician and assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. “Given its proven benefits and low side-effect profile, if it were a pill, everyone would be on it!”
Exercise reduces your chances of getting a host of illnesses, keeps bones strong and healthy, helps you maintain your vitality and independence in later years, and improves your mood and mental functioning. In short, it can help you live a longer, healthier life.
Study after study shows that fitness prolongs life. To name just a few examples, researchers reporting in 2003 in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that women who began walking a mile a day after age 65 were about half as likely to have died of heart disease, cancer, or any cause compared with their sedentary counterparts. A study of more than 800 older men in the Netherlands associated regular biking with a 29% reduction in the death rate. Even gardening works: Another study found that gardeners who set aside more than an hour a week to enjoy that pastime were less likely to die of cardiac arrest than inactive folks.
Exercise even trumps the risks of some unhealthy lifestyle choices and illnesses. According to a 1996 Journal of the American Medical Association study of more than 25,000 men and 7,000 women, staying moderately fit proves protective even when a person smokes or has high blood pressure, high cholesterol, or other health problems.
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