Some big stretches a day might keep the doctor away. New research uncovered a link between living longer and being more flexible. The findings suggest that proactively helping people stay limber can promote good health into our later years, the researchers say.
Flexibility has long been an important component of recommended exercise regimens for people of all ages and fitness levels. But the scientists behind this new study, published in the August issue of the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, say that not much research has been done to look at how flexibility specifically can affect our longevity.
To address this gap, the researchers analyzes data from over 3,000 middle-aged people enrolled in a long-running project in Brazil that began in 1994: the CLINIMEX Exercise open cohort. People in this study underwent extensive evaluations of their health and physical fitness, which included tests of their flexibility. The project also continued to track their health over time, including if and when they died. Based on results from tests that measured people’s range of motion involving seven joints, the researchers created a body flexibility score (higher score = more flexible), which they coined “Flexindex.”
Overall, people who had a higher Flexindex were less likely to die during the study period than those who were less flexible, the researchers found (due to the covid-19 pandemic emerging in 2020, the researchers excluded such deaths from the analysis). Women tended to be more flexible than men, and there were differences in flexibility-related longevity between the two groups. After accounting for other factors like body mass index or age, less flexible men were nearly twice as likely to die than highly flexible men, while less flexible women were almost five times as likely to die than highly flexible women.
“Our findings support the significance of flexibility as an integral component of health-related physical fitness,” the researchers wrote.
This type of research can only show a correlation between being flexible and a longer lifespan, not a direct cause-and-effect relationship. But plenty of other studies have found that exercise in general can extend and improve the quality of our later years of life.
“Since body flexibility levels could be improved by specific training regimens, future studies should explore whether training-induced gains in flexibility will provide independent and/or additive survival benefits in middle-aged and older individuals,” the team wrote.
The researchers say we should look into whether it’s worthwhile to routinely assess people’s flexibility as part of a typical check-up. And given that people tend to lose flexibility with age, they also argue that we should study whether stretching-related exercises like yoga can help older people stay healthier and live longer.
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