A Boston Globe column ran this week under the headline "Your birthday says one thing. Your grip strength says another." The writer, Beth Teitell, admits she doesn't even want to know her healthspan, but everywhere she turns online she's "forced at squat point" to calculate her looming doom. She ends by asking whether we truly want to know at all. That's a fair reaction, and if you've felt some version of it, I completely understand. The current environment around longevity te

Bone density doesn't make headlines the way muscle mass or VO2 max does. But it should, because once you cross into your 40s, bone loss becomes one of the quieter risk factors driving the trajectory of your longevity age, and most people have no idea what kind of exercise actually protects it, let alone how much. A new study (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42716561/) aims to change that. It pooled 124 randomized controlled trials covering 18,429 participants aged 40 and olde

I’ve spent a few posts now picking apart biological age tests, mostly because the epigenetic clocks behind them don’t agree with each other and were never built to judge one person. But when a massive new study lands claiming exercise lowers your biological age, it’s worth asking: is this just click-bait or is there something here? Turns out, it’s a little of both. A new study in The Lancet Healthy Longevity looked at 44 studies and 145,465 people for anything linking physica

You’ve probably seen it by now. Someone kneels on the floor, explodes up onto their feet in one jump, and the caption says if you can do it, you’re biologically under 30. The challenge itself is simple enough - start kneeling, use your hips, core, and legs to jump straight up to standing, no hands on the ground. Fail it and, according to the trend, you’re aging faster than your birthday says. Except one has nothing to do with the other. Biological age, the concept behind the

Plant-based eating has a well-earned reputation for heart health and longevity. So it’s tempting to assume going vegan is an across-the-board win, especially later in life when you’re already thinking hard about aging well. But there’s a catch, and it’s one that matters a lot for anyone over 65. A randomized controlled trial published in August 2026 in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition put 72 healthy older adults, all 65 or up, into one of three groups for 12 weeks.

Spit in a tube, mail it off, get back a number that says your cells are "7 years younger" than your birth certificate. Epigenetic age testing has become the trendy way to measure how you're actually aging, and the marketing makes it sound like the whole answer. But what does it actually mean for you? Epigenetic clocks look at chemical tags that attach to your DNA at specific locations that shift in predictable patterns as you age. Run enough of these tags through an algorithm

Everyone's chasing a single number now. $200 DNA kits, $700 blood panels, $10,000 clinic programs, all promising to hand you your "true" biological age. Unfortunately, a lot of them can't even agree with each other. Different "clocks" measure different things. GrimAge predicts mortality risk, DunedinPACE measures your pace of aging, PhenoAge runs off blood biomarkers. There's no mandated reference range, no standardized method. Saliva and blood samples from the same person, r

Try Googling "functional fitness assessment older adults." What you'll get back is a stack of academic papers. Systematic reviews. Sensor-based gait analysis studies. Nothing that actually tells you, in plain language, what this is or why it matters. Why? Because although there is tons of well-validated research on the topic, most if it has just never made it out of the journals and into anything a person can actually use. So here's the plain-language version, specifically wh

Everyone's watch has an opinion about your VO2 max now. Garmin, WHOOP, Oura, Apple Watch — pull up the app and there it is, a number supposedly telling you how fit you are. Turns out that number is mostly a guess. Your watch doesn't, and physically cannot, measure VO2 max. Instead, it estimates it using your heart rate and your pace. A real VO2 max test measures the actual gas you're breathing in and out while you work at your cardiometabolic limit. Your watch has none of tha