From: Ike Groff To: Lesley Groff Subject: Fwd: (WPT) `Do Or Decline': An Athlete's Age May Be Less Important to Performance Than Persistent Practice Date: Sat, 04 Feb 2017 18:09:06 +0000 Sent from my iPad Begin forwarded message: From: Will Ford Date: February 4, 2017 at 8:26:12 AM EST To: undisclosed-recipients:; Subject: (WPT) 'Do Or Decline': An Athlete's Age May Be Less Important to Performance Than Persistent Practice `Do Or Decline': An Athlete's Age May Be Less Important to Performance Than Persistent Practice Friday, February 3, 2017 10:40 AM by Ginny McReynolds Feb. 3 (Washington Post) -- For three decades, Joseph Baker has been swimming, cycling and running in triathlons some would call punishing. Baker, 47, is also a professor of exercise sciences. As he competed in races as a younger man, he would watch people of all ages alongside him, and he soon became fascinated with the parameters of human performance. Why could some 70-year-olds compete in triathlons and some got winded walking up a flight of stairs? He wanted to know whether age decline is a result of simply getting older or being sedentary. In other words: Are we racing against time, or are we racing against ourselves? [Older Americans are most happy in Hawaii, least happy in West Virginia, according to new Gallup ranking] Baker points to a seminal 1996 study from Stanford University analyzing age-related decline that looked at areas such as the number of muscle cells, DNA repair, fingernail growth and physical activity. The finding was that there is a 0.5 percent decline per year, a statistic he says has served as the biomarker of the aging process. Since that time, Baker and his colleagues at York University in Toronto have dedicated their research to determining how much of that decline is out of human hands, and how much we can control. Baker leans heavily toward the latter. He studies people in their 60s and 70s as they play handball, particularly the goalkeepers,