Pull on your yoga wear and get yourself stretchy, as international and an Australian researcher found the bendiest of us tend to survive longer. The team looked at the flexibility of over 3000 middle-aged people – determined by rating their ability to do 20 different flexy movements – and followed up with them after more than a decade. They say that when they adjusted for people’s age, BMI and health status, men and women with low flexibility scores had a 1.87- and 4.78-times higher risk of dying, respectively, than those with a high score. While this kind of study cannot say that your bendiness is directly going to keep you alive, maybe we should all be doing more sun salutations.
Journal/conference: Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports
Link to research (DOI): Paper
Organisation/s: The University of Sydney
Funder: The authors received no specific funding for this work.
Media release
From: Wiley
Can flexibility help people live longer?Flexibility exercises are often included in the exercise regimens of athletes and exercisers. New research in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports suggests that levels of flexibility may affect survival in middle-aged individuals.After analyzing data on 3,139 people (66% men) aged 46–65 years, investigators obtained a body flexibility score, termed Flexindex. This score was derived from a combination of the passive range of motion in 20 movements (each scored 0–4) involving 7 different joints, resulting in a score range of 0–80.Flexindex was 35% higher in women compared with men. During an average follow-up of 12.9 years, 302 individuals (9.6%) comprising 224 men and 78 women died. Flexindex exhibited an inverse relationship with mortality risk and was nearly 10% higher for survivors compared with non-survivors in both men and women.After taking age, body mass index, and health status into account, men and women with a low Flexindex had a 1.87- and 4.78-times higher risk of dying, respectively, than those with a high Flexindex.“Being aerobically fit and strong and having good balance have been previously associated with low mortality. We were able to show that reduced body flexibility is also related to poor survival in middle-aged men and women,” said corresponding author Claudio Gil S. Araújo, MD, PhD, of the Exercise Medicine Clinic – CLINIMEX, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.He added that as flexibility tends to decrease with aging, it may be worth paying more attention to flexibility exercises and routinely including assessments of body flexibility as part of all health-related physical fitness evaluations.