Not necessarily for those two ages exactly.
I’m now 60. I think I have relatively good physical abilities still. I’d like to have an idea of what I might expect my abilities when I’m 80.
Is there some study or data that indicates such abilities? If I can run 3 miles, do 3X10 pull ups, bench press 120lbs X 2 X15reps, hike 20 miles on flat land with a 30lb pack…what might I expect my abilities at 70? or 80?
When I was 60 I could still do everything I could do at fifty, or forty. Seven years later, there’s been quite a bit of fall-off. It isn’t merely stamina or strength, it is also the gradually increasing sense that I am crumbling, bit by bit. From what I hear, 80 is about when you feel, not only aging, but actually old. That is, if you’ve kept good care of your physical self and are genetically lucky.
I was having this exact same conversation yesterday with my older brother. He is 82 I am 75. He has stayed in shape all his life and exercised I worked hard throughout my life but never exercised. My strength stayed relatively consistent with a slight downward trend until about 50 and then the strength seemed to start fading a little faster. Running and jumping ability as far as speed goes started declining in my early 30’s but my stamina seemed more reliant on my current level of physical activity. At 60 I could still hike up and down hills bird hunting even better than I could in my 20’s but at a slower pace. When I retired at 63 I started noticing a more rapid decline in my endurance that was compounded by my lack of willingness to push through it thus becoming less and less active until about 5 years ago when about all I was doing was surfing the net and drinking coffee with my buddies. It got so bad I would be winded if I walked 1 block at a moderately fast pace. In the past year I have made a couple of attempts to start exercising but my back and knees had gotten so weak I would quit because of the pain. About 6 weeks ago I decided to change my strategy and just become more active. I got back to doing the gardening, painting the house. walking to the store, more frequent trips shopping. Parking further back in the parking lot things like that. It does seem to be paying off. I am not having to force myself to be active as much and find myself looking for projects. I had a complete physical and Dr says everything is good. I am currently on no medication. Still short winded but it has improved enough that I can actually get some work done. I haven’t completely quit smoking but have got it down to about 1 pack a week from 2 packs a day.
There is what happens to the average person.
There is what happens to a person who makes some effort to be active and maintain their strength and stamina.
At some point you’re going to decline no matter what you do, but where people are at 80 seems highly variable to me.
I have a friend who used to play Big Ten football and has exercised all his life. He’s nearly 70 and finally having to admit he’s slowing down and just can’t do what he used to do - but he is still stronger and with more stamina than most men half his age.
If you are serious about maintaining your health and exercise then at 80 you can probably still run 3 miles… but at a slower pace. You may or may not be able to do pull ups, the bench press might be at a lower weight. The walking/hiking on the flat will probably be least impaired but, again, likely at a slower pace.
IF you are serious with your exercise.
As you age maintaining is going to get harder, and at a certain point, like I said, you’ll start losing some of your abilities. A lot depends on where you start and what you do.
As @HoneyBadgerDC alludes to, sometimes it’s about maintaing a general level of activity rather than intermittent high-intensity workouts.
When you get into real old age (let’s say 80 and up) maintaining your ability to walk, care for your self, clean the house, etc. becomes more important than running marathons.
I’m 67 and do lots of hiking. I’m trying to get into better shape for a 20 mile hike a few weeks from now, but regularly and comfortably do hikes up to about 14 miles already, up to around 1000’ of ascent.
There are other issues that affect physical ability, though. It’s not just strength and stamina. One is gradual deterioration of nerves, especially due to spinal and other issues that pinch and stress the nerves. Deterioration of motor and sensory nerves is one of the major reasons people grow lame in old age. Another is balance. There are a few things you can do to help with these issues but they’re not as straightforward to improve as strength and stamina are. These are limiting my physical ability more than my muscles are. Moreover, both of these issues increase the risk of falling, which itself is more dangerous when it happens because bones get more brittle and involve longer recovery time and increased tendency toward some permanent disability.
One way you could do this on your own is to find fitness values for various ages. Compare your current fitness to the average for your age. Whatever percentage different you are from the average of your current age might be the same at the higher ages. So say you’re 20% fitter than the average 60-year-old. Look at the study for what an average 80-year-old can do and you might be able to do 20% better. Here’s one such study, but it only goes to 65:
However, I would expect one factor in fitness later in life is your body’s genetic ability to stay fit. As you get older, you’ll get injured more easily and take longer to heal. How your body can handle those situations will affect your ability to stay active. I suspect that the older people who stay very fit have some aspect in their genetics which help minimize the injuries they get while being active.
Genetics are a factor, yes, but so is dedication to maintaining physical fitness as you age. This doesn’t require intense workouts - indeed, for the elderly that might be a bad thing due to the risk of injury - but keep moving should be your mantra. You can always screw up good genetics by doing the wrong things or failing to do the right ones.
If you want to maintain a good level of physical ability into your 80’s you need to start and maintain good exercise habits, eat right, avoid bad habits, and get on top of any chronic conditions you may have or develop to keep them under control. It’s not any one thing, it’s a handful of daily habits you need to develop and do every day going forward.
I was expecting a compare and contrast here! How has your brother’s fitness held up compared to yours? I’m not sure what I expect the answer to be as exercise does not to be a formal program to be effective.
As to the question of the OP, well the answer is not so straightforward. It is a bit like retirement planning? How much have do you have in your funds is only part of the question. How you live in your retirement is another piece.
There is of course the issue of what fitness, both cardiorespiratory fitness and strength fitness, you start off with. Then there is what you do to continue to add or to minimize withdrawals. The person who hits 65 and stops exercising will see declines. The person who keeps up a rounded fitness program with both moderate cardiorespiratory aimed elements and some modest amount of strength training, may even see gains over the next decade or so. The person who becomes sedentary can expect rapid declines. Even starting from a solid base.
Of course a solid base may be predictive of a higher likelihood of continuing to exercise as well …
In his weight training thread @Dr_Paprika provided links to many studies documenting exactly how exercise impacts muscle mass and strength losses that occur without exercise, and how gains are possible with modest investments even in older age groups, if you want some details.
A lot depends on whether you continue trying to frequently do those things. You want to do enough strength training to maintain muscle mass and enough cardio to keep your VO2 max as high as possible. VO2 max drops with age, even in fit people, and so you want to minimize this. Strategies for doing so have been proposed but have not been well tested in people (proper trials take decades), but this is a very active area of research. Good general longevity advice is discussed in the books Outlive (Attia), The Longevity Solution (Fung) and Lifespan (Sinclair). I do not agree with some of the stuff in all of these books, but they are generally good, mostly free of quackery and tied selling, and are a good introduction to the science, which is real and fascinating.
Attia quotes this study, below, when discussing VO2 max and longevity. It shows the difference between ages 30 or 60. The differences between 60 and 80 would be bigger. But I don’t get the sense Attia knows very much about strength training, and he is sometimes very quick to recommend tests and devices and hiring experts. I don’t think these are always needed or helpful, and there are significant negative consequences to certain tests. If you can mitigate the possible outcome of test results when sensitivity is poor and interpretability is questionable, you are probably better off just recommending what we know mitigates disease: healthy habits, more exercise and including more dietary vegetables and fibre. Of course Attia is also trying to stress the value of preventative medicine, and I agree with him in principle and in part.
Well, my older brother does have more stamina because of his work out regime. But he is also on a lot of meds that I am not on. Diabetes, kidney issues from too much over the counter pain meds, blood and heart problems etc. but he does look very young and remains active and for the most part healthy. I think I am still stronger and have better Ballance , But my stamina is in the toilet, possibly from a long period of complete inactivity. I worked hard all my life both at work and at home.
This study looks at performance (by VO2 max) versus age, sex, and level of fitness. Essentially, an eighty year old man in the top 2.3% of fitness has the same VO2 max as an unfit nineteen year old woman (in the bottom 25%).
Sorry, took longer to edit than allowed. Let me explain further. (Graphs taken from Attia.)
The second graph (above) shows how VO2 declines with age for people of high (95% for age), average (50% for age) and low (5% for age) levels of fitness, as well as the VO2 needed to do various strenuous activities. Taken from Attia, the data is from a 2020 book by Ligouri from the ACSM.
The first table shows VO2 ranges (and METabolic eqivalentS which are multiples of 1=“at rest”) for men and women by age range and fitness of low (bottom 25%), below average (26-50%), above average (51-75%), high (75-97.6%) and elite (top 2.3%). The data is taken from the JAMA study below. Essentially, an eighty year old man in the top 2.3% of fitness has the same VO2 max as an unfit nineteen year old woman (in the bottom 25%). Basically, comparing a 60 year old man of fitness X% for age sixty, an eighty year old man would be roughly the same as fitness (X-25)% for age sixty (and X>25).
To reduce the drop in VO2 max which occurs with age, you want to do strenuous activities, particularly ones lasting longer than a minute. VO2 testing often uses activities from 3-8 minutes at a high (but not maximum) level of intensity, say a “perceived exertion” of 8/10 or so.
A few minor comments-
First to emphasize that this is real VO2max. The numbers some of us are seeing calculated on our various wearables are not bad, some research that claims within 5% for higher levels if an accurate HRmax is entered, but they still are not true VO2max, just a correlate of it based off formulae. Thise us who see those numbers must take them with a grain of salt.
Second the huge genetic contribution to VO2max also has to be acknowledged. Reportedly about 50% and also reportedly an untrained individual can reasonably expect to improve their VO2max by 15% but not much more.
VO2max has been well studied as a marker of CRF and its predictive value for healthspan is established, but there are other elements to CRF as well, if if their health implications are not as well documented to date.
Also brief strenuous will do it for VO2max AND more prolonged moderate will too, just as well.
Once you can measure something, you can compare things. Once you can compare things, you can misinterpret them. See what they teach in an MBA course; lots of stuff you can calculate or graph, and so easily mark. But does it mean much in practice?
I don’t think VO2 max will turn out to be the best measure of fitness or longevity. But it makes more sense than most. I don’t think there is high value in getting an exact measurement at a sports medicine lab. But it makes sense to train, in part, for different lengths of time, that use different energy systems and different amounts of aerobic and anaerobic metabolism. And that should improve it regardless of whether you have quantified it. If you can do more work faster, and recover quicker, you likely have improved your VO2 max.
Hand grip strength also correlates with longevity. I think this means having muscle is good and is protective. I don’t think it means you need to train your grip strength every day, or that doing just handiwork will guarantee you an extra decade.
I’m not sure the optimum method of preserving VO2 max. Not sure anyone else does either. I hope in 20 years I can still do an hour of work with METS>20. I had to move a 100 lb. piece of old furniture up the steps recently, so at least I can still do that. 
Note VO2 max = METS max * 3.5
I don’t know how genetics and VO2 max correlate, but the idea with training it can only be improved by a maximum of 15% or whatever intuitively seems like a unlikely result.
It may be true that a study focuses on young athletes already naturally fit and trains them further. Of course the specific training matters a great deal. One would expect runners and bikers to be aerobically efficient. One might not expect it so much of powerlifters.
But an overweight, unfit adult who starts routinely doing a variety of regular strength and aerobic exercises? Loses a good chunk of weight in the process? Starts eating healthier, stops smoking, gets off the blood pressure and pre-diabetes meds… His VO2 max is only gonna go up 15%? No. If he moves from low (bottom 25%) to high (top 25%) of fitness for his age, his VO2 max could easily climb from 35 to 50, which is a 50% improvement. Of course this is a hypothetical example, but the numbers have to pass the sniff test too.
I could see 15% as an average result from people who don’t train actually very hard or specifically, which describes many of the people in the commercial gym where I train. I emphasize that just being in the gym at all doing anything is a smart move on their part, and am not being judgey But certainly 15% is not a maximum improvement in VO2; you want to pick your parents well, and genetics more strongly defines the top few percent probably (who can be elite), but not most of it.
The papers you reference are looking at healthy younger athletes for periods under eight weeks. They acknowledge the lack of quality studies addressing VO2 and don’t have a lot to say about how older people may improve. But there is much interest in this topic, so stay tuned on the bat channel. Or not. Good studies would take years.
If I have the chance I’ll try to chase down more papers (in Copenhagen for my father daughter marathon Sunday!) and I have my suspicions on that often stated number, but the point is I think valid: there seems to be a fairly hard time individual genetic upper limit for VO2max. VO2max is much less trainable than lactate threshold is, for example.
But this strays afield from the op.
I hope you have fun in Copenhagen. How exciting!
Thank you!
Meanwhile I had some time while my wife napped …
Untrained individuals 12 week programs soccer or running. See table 3.
Power increased most significantly and VO2max relative to body weight was an impressive increase impacted by change in body weight. But VO2max itself? 11.8 and 13.9% increases in running and soccer groups respectively.
I think it’s unlikely that exercise habits will change all that much after 60. Someone who exercises regularly at 60 is likely to continue exercising at a similar effort level. The changes in their aging body means that exertion level will likely go down from an objective standpoint, but feel about the same level of difficulty. For instance, if a 60-year-old regularly does spin classes at a level they feel is moderately difficult, they may continue at that same “feels like” level even though the actual exertion level on the bike goes down as they get older. A sedentary 60-year-old is likely to continue those sedentary habits as they get older. Certainly some people change their habits, but I wouldn’t expect that the habits commonly change by a great deal. It’s probably best to look at overall average declines rather than edge cases where someone massively increases their fitness level after 60.