Grip, balance, and the fall that doesn't happen

In 1990 a physician named Maria Fiatarone put ten people in a Boston nursing home, average age ninety, on a program of heavy leg strength training, eight weeks, three times a week. The weights went up more than a hundred and seventy percent. Walking speed went up. Some of them set down their canes. It was published in a major medical journal, and it ended, for anyone who read it, the idea that it's ever too late.

Seven years later, in New Zealand, a program called Otago took the next step: a simple set of leg-strengthening and balance exercises, done at home three times a week by people over sixty-five, with a walking plan. It cut falls by about a third, and it's now prescribed in health systems around the world.

And in 2010 a British researcher named Rachel Cooper pulled together studies on tens of thousands of people and found that one measurement, how hard you can squeeze with your hand, predicts how long you'll live better than almost anything a doctor can check. Grip isn't magic. It's a window. A body that has kept its grip has kept its muscle, its nerves and its habits.

The key is fall-proofing, and it's for you now, not at seventy. Every fall that puts an older person in a hospital was decided years earlier, by whether the legs stayed strong, the balance stayed trained, and the grip stayed firm. Those three things are trainable at any age, and the earlier you start, the more you keep.

Balance is the one most of us never train. Stand on one foot while you brush your teeth. That's the whole prescription to start. If you wobble, good; that's the muscle learning. If you can't do it at all, that's the most important thing you'll learn this month, and it's fixable.