“Healthspan” is a new buzzword recently added to our vocabulary. It reflects the length of time we stay healthy rather than simply being alive. While the average lifespan in the U.S. is around 79 years, the average healthspan (the age at which someone develops a serious illness) is 63 years. This means a typical person in the U.S. spends approximately one-fifth of their life living with a disease or medical condition. 

It is in our best interest to extend our healthspan to stay free of illness and live well. One of the 2024 American Physiology Summit sessions was dedicated to exploring how we can increase our healthspan.

In his inspirational speech, Glenn Gaesser, PhD, an exercise physiologist from Arizona State University, stressed the importance of being fit over focusing on losing weight, saying it’s “better to be fit than not fat.” He shared compelling evidence on how physical activity, such as 30 minutes of brisk walking, leads to increased cardiorespiratory fitness and reduces mortality in people of all sizes.

Exercise targets “unhealthy” abdominal (visceral) fat. Compare that to having fat removal surgery without making any lifestyle changes—that surgery only gets rid of subcutaneous fat (fat located right underneath the skin) and has no health benefits.

Gaesser also warned conference attendees about health risks associated with gaining and losing weight over and over again (called weight cycling). One of his published studies reports a 36% increase in deaths due to cardiovascular disease and a 41% increase in overall death as people cycle through bouts of weight loss and regain.

Another speaker, Siddhartha Angadi, PhD, a cardiovascular exercise physiologist at the University of Virginia, offered an unorthodox suggestion on how to make our exercise routine more fun by introducing meeting attendees to the popular 1970s British comedy team Monty Python.

Angadi explained how ergonomically inefficient a human’s walk is when compared to chimpanzees. Our normal gait burns only few calories as we take a few steps here and there. Angadi’s solution was to employ some of Monty Python’s silly walks in our daily routines. His study found that when participants performed the “teabag walk,” they used the most energy. This silly walk is great for stretching and may turn some heads if you do it in public!

While physical activity is important for everyone, sticking to a daily exercise routine becomes crucial for astronauts as NASA astronaut and comparative physiologist Jessica Meir, PhD, explained in her keynote lecture. Space travel has a detrimental effect on cardiovascular health by increasing the thickness and rigidity of blood vessels. Exposure to microgravity during prolonged flight causes a loss of bone and muscle mass. To combat these effects, astronauts must take a break from the important experiments they do in space to dedicate at least two hours per day to exercise.

Maybe Meir’s “station life” exercise video will encourage you to be physically active and carve some workout time in your daily routine. Let’s try to extend our healthspan as much as we can!