AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
There are fitness competitions that test speed, strength and endurance. And then there's a new challenge that tries to do something quite different - measure how well someone will age. Reporter Alan Yu from member station WHYY in Philadelphia attended the first Super Age Games and has this to report.
ALAN YU, BYLINE: Kevin Shesh wants to live to more than 100 years old. That goal started more than 20 years ago.
KEVIN SHESH: My daughter was born in 2001, and I hopped on the scale in 2002 when I was approaching 200 pounds. And I said to myself, if I want to see this beautiful baby go to college, get married, I better start doing something.
YU: He started working out seriously. He ran two marathons and became a certified personal trainer. But is he on track to live to 100? To find out, he went to the Super Age Games in New York last weekend.
(CHEERING)
YU: Inside a large indoor track arena, hundreds of people went through eight trials with spectators watching. They crawled across a cargo net, suspended a few feet in the air, went all out on an exercise bike for four minutes and tried to hang onto a bar with their feet off the ground for as long as they could.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Ooh, 258.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: That was great.
YU: Shesh, did well on that one.
SHESH: When I was doing a dead hang, I heard the crowd, like, I don't - I kept saying to myself, Kevin (laughter).
YU: David Stewart created the games to give participants a way to test their health and potential longevity. Each trial focuses on a metric linked to living not just longer, but also better cardiovascular fitness, balance, brain health and even social connections.
DAVID STEWART: It had to be trainable. It had to be measurable, and it had to be accessible.
YU: There are six physical fitness trials, but participants also have to recognize microexpressions in faces on an iPad to test how well they can form social connections. Kevin Shesh took the trials seriously.
SHESH: I trained for this, so, you know, I can't say it was a piece of cake, but it's just another workout for me in a different fashion.
YU: Stewart says people can treat it like a contest. But really, you're competing with yourself. Everyone gets their own test scores. It's meant to be fun and give people ideas for what to work on. He says that's because aging well should not require intense, time-consuming training.
STEWART: I believe that all of these things should just be, like, a comfortable, loose-fitting garment. And it is not a constrictive top-down protocol - you must do X.
YU: So do these tests work? The measures they use are valid, says John Beard, who studies aging at Columbia University, but there's a caveat. For instance, the bike station at the Super Age Games tests how much oxygen your body can use when it's pushed to the limit, which is called VO2 max. He looked at research which shows people with the highest VO2 max live longer compared to just regular, fit and healthy people.
JOHN BEARD: But then I figured out how much time they would have to spend training to actually achieve that level of VO2 max. And it was about the same amount of time that they lived longer. So they were living longer, but they spent that entire period in the gym.
YU: So he says that if people like to work out a lot, they should go for it. But for most of us, you just need to stay active, eat a healthy diet, don't smoke and don't drink too much.
For NPR News, I'm Alan Yu.
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