The National Senior Games open today in Des Moines, Iowa, and run through August 4: more than 12,500 registered athletes, all at least fifty years old, competing in 25 sports from track and swimming to pickleball and powerlifting. One of us has stood on the powerlifting platform at these Games. What follows is less a news post than a report from a place where the longevity industry has no customers.
Ben’s takeI have lifted weights for most of my adult life, and I compete in powerlifting at the Senior Games. People assume I do it to fight aging. I do it because I love the feel of a heavy deadlift and because of the people: competitors in their seventies and eighties, many of whom have been showing up for decades, none of whom are talking about their biomarkers. The lesson of decades in a weight room is that the people still training are not the ones with the most sophisticated programs. They are the ones who found something they would miss and kept doing it. The barbell stopped being a longevity intervention a long time ago. It is part of who I am, and that is why I still show up.
Loree’s takeIn 1996 I competed in national aerobics championships, and what I learned there has shaped everything since: movement should feel like celebration, not punishment. I hike every day for the same reason. The patients who tell me they hate exercise have never been given permission to move in a way they enjoy, so they do nothing and feel guilty. Des Moines this week is 12,500 people who found the thing they would miss. That is the whole prescription.
What the research adds. The social part is not incidental. A long-running Danish cohort published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings found that people who played social sports — tennis, badminton, soccer — lived markedly longer than sedentary people, and longer than solitary joggers and gym-goers; tennis players gained an average of 9.7 years of life expectancy, joggers 3.2. The authors flagged the social-interaction pattern as something to investigate rather than a proven cause, and so do we. But it fits everything else: movement that comes with people serves two fundamentals at once, and the Games are nothing if not movement with people.
Why it matters to a recovering optimizer. There is a version of fitness that is a solitary, measured, optimized protocol, and there is a version that is a pickleball court in Iowa in July. The evidence on consistency says the second kind wins over decades, because people keep doing what they love and abandon what they endure. Nobody at these Games needs a reason to train. That is the point.
Find the movement you would miss if you couldn't do it. Then do it with people.