I thought this was really interesting, as well as motivating. I wish we knew what his mid-70’s baseline was. From Peter Attia’s newsletter.
You’re never too old to start exercising – just ask a 93-year-old rowing champion
An excerpt:
A case study in healthy aging
As we’ve discussed on numerous occasions on The Drive , studying the oldest members of society (nonagenarians, centenarians, and beyond) can provide insights on the science and processes of aging – for instance, whether losses in muscle mass and cardiorespiratory fitness are inevitable with advancing age or are instead at least partially explained by a reduction in physical activity level. So when news of Richard Morgan’s physical prowess reached investigators in Ireland and the Netherlands, they invited him to undergo various physiological and performance tests in the hope of shedding light on these questions.
The results, published in a brief report this past December, astounded the investigators. Body composition measurements determined Morgan to have high muscle mass (105 lbs; 80.6% of total body mass) and a body fat percentage of 15.4% – values that would fall within a healthy range for a man half his age. Equally impressive were his metrics of cardiopulmonary function and physical performance. Morgan’s forced vital capacity, a measure of lung function, was reported to be 3.36 L, a value more typical of men in their 40s or 50s. In a 2,000-meter time trial on a rowing ergometer, the nonagenarian demonstrated exceptional cardiovascular adaptation to exercise, with his heart rate rapidly rising to a peak of 153 beats/min and oxygen uptake kinetics (a measure of time required to adapt to a changing metabolic load) approximating those of a healthy man in his 30s or 40s. These results were all the more remarkable given that Morgan had only started exercising in his 70s – building up his fitness, as he says, “from nowhere.”