Original title: Effect of Age on Physical Function Improvement in Older Veterans Enrolled in the Gerofit Exercise Program
Angela J. Guo, Stacy Schantz Wilkins, Rebecca J. Melrose, Daniel Fernández +3 · October 2026
Researchers tracked 62 military veterans aged 60 to 99 who joined a tailored exercise program. Over three months, the veterans did balance, strength, and aerobic workouts. The scientists tested how many times participants could stand up from a chair, how fast they could walk eight feet, and how far they walked in six minutes. Everyone gained leg strength, and people in their nineties improved their chair stands just as quickly as those in their sixties.
A runner enters a training camp with worn-out shoes that have started to lose their grip and support. Getting back onto the track is hard, but practicing quick step drills still makes the runner's legs visibly firmer. Running a fast lap around the whole park, however, does not get any easier in just a few weeks. In this paper, targeted daily routines still built up leg strength even in the oldest bodies, but whole-body endurance walking did not budge.
As people grow very old, losing strength and balance often leads to falls and a loss of personal independence. Doctors rarely have solid data on whether exercise still helps once someone reaches ninety. This shows that the oldest seniors still gain lower-body strength from supervised workouts, which helps argue they should not be left out of fitness programs.
The study only followed 62 participants over a relatively short period of three months. It did not find significant improvements in cardiovascular endurance as measured by the 6-minute walk test (p = 0.14). Additionally, while younger participants improved their balance and mobility on the 8-foot up-and-go test, participants aged 90 to 99 showed no significant improvement on that specific task.
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Effect of Age on Physical Function Improvement in Older Veterans Enrolled in the Gerofit Exercise Program — Angela J. Guo, Stacy Schantz Wilkins, Rebecca J. Melrose et al. — Healthcare — doi:10.3390/healthcare14193348
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.