Discover actionable steps to live a longer and healthier life.
Longevity is not about living forever — it’s about living better for more years. As the body ages, balance, strength, and cardiorespiratory fitness inevitably decline, sometimes beginning as early as your 30s. The good news: You can offset those declines by building a strong foundation now. The Equinox Longevity Assessment was developed alongside Michael Crandall, CSCS, a COACH X at Equinox, to provide members with evidence-based, science-backed benchmarks for their fitness age, a measure of whether your body is biologically older — or younger — than your chronological age and is also a predictor of disease and mortality risk.
Ahead, discover seven ways to help optimize your health as you age. Want to take a deeper dive? Access the full assessment here.
1. Invest in strength training.
Research suggests strength training can preserve your type II muscle fibers, which are responsible for short, powerful bursts of movement like jumping or sprinting. Luckily, it’s never too late to start strength training. Yes, it takes more time to see gains in your later decades, but if you put in the work, you can still rebuild and maintain muscle. A 2023 study published in the International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism found that even people in their 80s and 90s who hadn’t weight trained previously saw improvements after 12 weeks of progressive, full-body resistance training. READ MORE
2. Maintain and improve muscle power.
Performing quicker movements against resistance, including your own body weight, can help you maintain and develop explosive power, which translates to better performance on the tennis and squash courts and a faster kick at the end of your 10K. This can be done by incorporating plyometric exercises, like box jumps, into your training or simply trying to stand up more quickly out of your chair. The power you build will improve your athletic performance, but it will also allow you to more effortlessly climb a long flight of stairs or lift your child up from the floor as you age. READ MORE
3. Support your heart health with aerobic exercise.
One likely reason aerobic exercise — rhythmic, repetitive physical activity that uses your major muscle groups, such as swimming, biking, and running — enhances longevity is that it’s good for your ticker. When performed regularly, moderate to vigorous aerobic activity strengthens your heart, which improves its ability to pump blood to your lungs and throughout your body, according to the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. Over time, aerobic exercise can also increase stroke volume (the amount of blood pumped per heartbeat) and lower resting heart rate, both of which are linked with reduced risk of cardiovascular disease. READ MORE
4. Prioritize stamina and athletic performance.
Improving your muscular endurance — what enables you to do 50 bodyweight squats in a row or, in real life, carry your laundry up a flight of stairs — will enhance your muscle fibers’ ability to keep firing for longer periods of time so you can work longer, faster, or both without more effort. It’s important to note that muscular endurance and cardiorespiratory endurance are linked and both contribute to the other synergistically to improve the functions of each, says Crandall. Both will help you perform activities longer and stronger. READ MORE
5. Monitor your heart rate recovery.
Health experts also use heart rate recovery after exercise as a predictor of mortality, as it can reveal a lot about your future risk for heart disease. Heart rate recovery is the difference between your max heart rate during exercise and your heart rate when you stop exercising. As your body adapts to the hard efforts of anaerobic training, your heart rate recovery will begin to improve. You’ll appreciate the gains the next time you run up a flight of stairs or have to sprint to your gate to catch a flight. READ MORE
6. Enhance your balance to avoid future injuries.
Being able to sit and rise from the floor is something you do reflexively when you are younger, but being able to perform this movement confidently with age is indicative of the type of life you’ll be able to lead. Good stability creates a foundation that allows you to safely train your strength and cardiovascular fitness. It’s what lets the body create the most force in the safest manner possible. Without it, force leaks into the joints or spine and injuries can occur. Training balance and stability is also one of the best ways to prevent falls, which affect more than one out of four Americans ages 65 and older each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. READ MORE
7. Track changes in your body composition.
It’s never too early to start measuring your body composition, which refers to the percentage of fat, muscle, bone, and other tissues in the body. Studies generally suggest that high fat mass is associated with increased risk of mortality and low lean body mass is associated with increased risk of mortality. Tracking your change in muscle mass is equally important. Researchers at UCLA analyzed BMI and muscle mass data for more than 3,600 seniors in a long-term study published in the American Journal of Medicine. The study found BMI wasn’t a good predictor of death, but muscle mass was. The more muscle people had correlated with better odds of survival. READ MORE