Movement in Adulthood

This chapter discusses the key strategies for maintaining movement ability across adulthood and give key recommendations for quantity and quality of exercise. The dramatic increase in the number of older people in the United States and worldwide creates a significant challenge to any number of existing societal infrastructures. To investigate the effect of increasing task difficulty on balancing, some studies have required participants to perform a second task, or even multiple tasks, while balancing. In research completed as part of the Baltimore Longitudinal Study on Aging, S. Ko and colleagues studied nearly four hundred generally healthy adults ranging in age from 60 to 94 years of age. Falling can be a serious problem, especially for older adults. Annually in the United States, more than 30 percent of people over 65 years of age experience a fall, and people over the age of 85 years are more than four times as likely to fall as people 65 to 74 years of age.