Strength & Mobility
The bathroom scale cannot tell the difference between losing fat and losing the tissue that keeps you out of a care home. That distinction gets more consequential every decade.
Strength & Mobility
Balance is a trainable skill that most people stop practising in their forties and only think about after the first fall. It responds quickly — but only to the right kind of practice.
Strength & Mobility
A device costing less than a pair of shoes predicts mortality, disability and hospital outcomes better than most things on a blood panel. What it is really measuring is the interesting part.
Strength & Mobility
It sounds like a party trick. It is a composite test of leg strength, hip mobility, balance and coordination — and the ability to reverse a fall is what determines whether a fall becomes a catastrophe.
Heart & Metabolic
Cardiorespiratory fitness declines about 10 per cent a decade, and accelerates after 70. It is also among the strongest predictors of mortality ever measured — and one of the more responsive to training.
Strength & Mobility
Gait speed predicts survival, disability and hospital outcomes about as well as anything in a geriatric assessment. Four metres and a stopwatch is the whole apparatus.
Strength & Mobility
The instinct to rest a painful joint is understandable and, for osteoarthritis, largely wrong. Loading is first-line treatment in every major guideline, and the reasons are worth understanding.
Strength & Mobility
Most people over 60 have rotator cuff tears on imaging, and most of them have no symptoms. Which means finding one on a scan explains considerably less than it appears to.
Living Well
Home hazard modification works, but only in the people who are already at high risk — and only when it is done properly rather than as a checklist of removed rugs.
Strength & Mobility
Most back pain at any age is non-specific and improves. In older adults the proportion with a serious underlying cause rises, which changes how quickly it should be looked at.
Strength & Mobility
Static stretching does not prevent injury, does not reduce soreness much, and does not lengthen tissue in any lasting way. What does improve range of motion is loading through it.
Preventive Care
Painful feet change how you walk, which changes your balance, which changes your falls risk. Reduced flexibility and eyesight mean many people over 70 cannot properly inspect their own feet.
Strength & Mobility
Nobody needs a gym membership, and the biggest mistake is not going too heavy — it is going too light for too long and concluding that it does not work.
Strength & Mobility
It looks gentle enough to seem unserious. In randomised trials it reduces falls by a margin comparable to intensive balance programmes, and the reason is structural rather than mystical.
Strength & Mobility
The slogan oversells it. What the data does support is that long uninterrupted sedentary periods carry risk independent of how much you exercise, and that breaking them up is easier than adding a workout.
Strength & Mobility
Some age-related forward curvature is structural and permanent. A meaningful share is postural and muscular, and telling the two apart determines whether exercise will help.
Heart & Metabolic
Consumer devices measure some things well, some things badly, and several things they should not be reporting at all. Knowing which is which makes them genuinely useful.
Strength & Mobility
Knee osteoarthritis dominates the coverage. Hip disease presents differently and is often mistaken for back trouble, and hand osteoarthritis affects daily function in ways that are easy to underestimate.
