Let’s face it. The odds of you finding Ponce de Leon’s Fountain of Youth are about the same as you winning the lottery. But if you see youthfulness as being healthy and able to live life independently in your old age, then just add weightlifting to your lifestyle and you’ve got a better chance of finding it.

Weightlifting, bodybuilding and other types of flexibility training, including yoga and its many variations, are all classified as cardiovascular exercises. And as for the fountain of youth, having a heart and circulatory system much younger then the age of your body is a recipe for a much longer and healthier life.

Take a seventy-year-old senior citizen who is not active and has no exercise regimens in his life. By the time he reaches this age, he will have lost over forty percent of his muscle mass and thirty percent of his muscle strength. This is the main reason why 40% of men and women over the age of 65 fall at least once a year.

This may not seem like a big deal, since most falls happen within the comforts of home. These falls due to lost muscle strength occur in the basic everyday movements of standing, walking and rising from a seated position. Other everyday chores like shopping, cleaning and bathing can be even more disastrous. Research has shown that falls, and the complications arising from them, are the leading cause of fatalities in seniors 75 and older.

It all boils down to lost muscle mass during the process of aging. This affliction, called atrophy, is defined as a decrease in the number and size of muscle fibers. Some amount of it can’t be helped, because medical science now believes that this is hereditary and will occur in the later years. But muscle atrophy can be reversed almost entirely, whether inherited or not—just by weight training.

As it happens, though, the ones that need it aren’t the ones doing it. Health clubs are filled with young people, their bodies glistening, looking like Greek statues and the picture of health. The over-fifty people are home deciding where to go for the early bird. And the over seventy people are home wondering if it’s safe to go anywhere at all. The truth is, even people in their nineties can get muscle gains—with sensible modifications, of course.

In 1990 a study was conducted by Tufts University on the subject of 'weight training for the elderly'. The participants in the study were six women and four men who resided in a nursing home. These were frail ninety-year olds, seven of them who used canes or walkers, who were suffering from osteoporosis, arthritis, bone fractures, coronary artery disease and high blood pressure among other common aches and pains considered “normal” for their ages.

After weight exercising three times a week for only eight weeks, these seniors had their gains tabulated— and the researchers were astonished at the results. Overall leg strength increased by 174%, total thigh muscle mass increased by 9%, two seniors discarded their canes, and one formerly chair-bound individual could now rise to a standing position without assistance. Sort of puts a new light on aging, doesn’t it?