Study Suggests Sport Performance Peaks From 20 To 30 Years Of Age, Then Declines Irreversibly
Also Included In: Sports Medicine / Fitness
Article Date: 03 Jul 2011 – 2:00 PDT
Geoffroy Berthelot and Stephane Len, both researchers at the IRMES (Institut de Recherche bioMedicale et d’Epidemiologie du Sport at INSEP, Paris, France), have published their findings in AGE, the official journal of the American Aging Association, describing the evolution of performances in elite athletes and chess grandmasters. This article is congruous with the epidemiological approaches developed by the laboratory, and suggests that changes in individual performance are linked to physiological laws structuring the living world.
Physiological parameters that characterize human capabilities (mobility, reproduction or the capacity to perform tasks) evolve throughout the life cycle. The physical and intellectual abilities follow the same pattern, starting at the moment of conception: The performance of each individual is limited at birth, then increases to a peak before declining until death. With these findings, Geoffroy Berthelot and Stephane Len modeled the careers of more than 2,000 athletes (from a panel of 25 Olympic disciplines) and grandmasters of chess. They demonstrate a simple relation between changes in performance and the age of individuals.
The results of this study validate a model previously published by Moore: The evolution of the performances of an individual throughout his life follows an exponential growth curve to a peak before declining irreversibly, following another negative exponential curve. This peak is reached at the age of 26.1 years for the disciplines studied: athletics (26.0 years), swimming (21.0 years) and chess (31.4 years). For each data set, the evolution curve is representative of a range of 91.7% of the variance at the individual level and 98.5% of the variance in terms of sport events. Moreover, these cycles are observable in other physiological parameters such as the development of lung function or cognitive skills, but also at the level of cells, organisms and populations, reflecting the fractal properties of such a law.
More here.
I would agree there is irreversible decline but I don’t agree that it’s inescapable or an inherent part of aging. We know that there are ways to avoid this damage through living a natural and healthy lifestyle.
For long lived animals in nature, I think (or at least hope) that all tissues and organs can potentially perform optimally until they reach their Hayflick Limit, when they just naturally break down. If you look at other Great Apes in the wild, they don’t get cardiovascular disease or appreciably get worse in the wild and live far over 60 years of age still swining in the trees sometimes. It’s because they are living as nature intended. When they are given human food… THEN they get cardiovascular disease, obesity, brittle bones etc. I do not know about “other organisms”, but certainly a lot of organisms are literally immortal nad are as good today as yesterday. It is easy to explain for example football/soccer in this way, as you can see the obvious tearing of ligaments etc., which causes irreversible decline. However it’s a lot harder to see how something like swimming could cause irreversible damage. But our food, the toxins and microorganisms we’re exposed to, the radiation like radon, etc.
Obviously GM’s Vishy Anand and Boris Gelfand were not a part of this study