Age vs Fitness Age, And Why It Matters

There is your chronological age, and there is your fitness age, which can allegedly be calculated with a formula that researchers have been tweaking for decades. Now comes the latest version, based on a new study published in June in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, and whose formula is built into new How Fit Are You, Really?website. Writing about the site in the New York Times, Gretchen Reynolds reports that the new calculations are based on data from more than 55,000 Norwegian adults who had completed extensive health questionnaires beginning in the 1980s. The scientists used the volunteers’ answers to estimate each person’s VO2max and fitness age, and they also looked at their death records. Reynolds tells us that the researchers found that if VO2max was 85 percent or more below the average for their age, people had an 82 percent higher risk of dying prematurely than those whose fitness age was the same as or more youthful than their actual age. The study’s authors are convinced that fitness age may predict a person’s risk of early death better than some traditional risk factors like being overweight, having high cholesterol levels or blood pressure, and smoking.