THE SCIENCE
The evidence behind what we do.
Able Years is built on decades of peer-reviewed research on training adults 60+. These four areas — muscle, bone, capacity, and balance — are where the evidence is strongest, and where our program produces the clearest results.
STAY STRONG
Your body can rebuild strength at any age.
After 60, muscle loss accelerates — but the research is unambiguous that supervised progressive training reverses it, even into the 80s and 90s. The Able Years approach to strength training for adults 60+ is built on that evidence.
Based on published research from the American College of Sports Medicine and the National Strength and Conditioning Association on resistance training and functional capacity in adults 60+.
STRONG BONES
Bones respond to load — at any age.
Osteopenia and osteoporosis describe reduced bone density, and until recently the clinical response was medication or acceptance. Randomized trials over the past decade show that progressive loaded training modestly slows, halts, or partially reverses the underlying trajectory.
In the LIFTMOR trial, 101 postmenopausal women training with supervised progressive loaded resistance for 8 months gained 4.1% in lumbar spine bone density. LIFTMOR-M replicated the effect in 93 men. Bone is living tissue — it responds to the load placed on it.
Supervised progressive resistance training with impact-loading elements where individually appropriate — the pattern that has produced the largest measured effects on bone in the literature.
Watson et al. 2018 (LIFTMOR) and Harding et al. 2020 (LIFTMOR-M). Journal of Bone and Mineral Research.
FULL CAPACITY
The reserves you think you’ve lost are trainable.
Frailty is a clinical syndrome of reduced physiologic reserve — not a personal attribute, and not a one-way trajectory. Structured training reduces its severity and reverses it in many pre-frail adults, with the evidence reaching into the 80s.
The SPRINTT trial, the largest multicomponent training trial of its kind, found that structured resistance, balance, and aerobic work reduced mobility disability by 22% over three years. The effect is strongest when training starts early — before the underlying trajectory has established itself.
Multicomponent training — progressive resistance, balance, and aerobic work — with 12 weeks as the evidence-supported minimum and individualization for multimorbidity and cognitive concerns.
Bernabei et al. 2022 (SPRINTT). British Medical Journal. 1,519 adults ≥70.
STAY STEADY
Stumbles don’t have to become falls.
About 28 percent of US adults 65+ fall at least once a year. The research shows this rate is substantially reducible — but only with a specific kind of training delivered at a specific dose.
The 2019 Cochrane review pooled 108 trials and 23,407 participants. Balance and functional training at ≥3 hours per week reduces fall rates by 42%. Pure resistance alone doesn’t — the modality and the dose both matter.
Balance and functional training integrated into every session, delivered at the Cochrane-identified ≥3 h/week dose threshold that produces the 42% fall-rate reduction in the literature.
Sherrington et al. 2019. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. 108 RCTs, 23,407 participants.
and functional training
Ready to see what this looks like for your body?
A 45-minute one-on-one Strategy Session. $49 for founding members, applied to your first month if you join. No commitment.