There’s an elderly fellow that frequents my gym three days a week named Fred (in a past column where I referred to Fred, I believe I mistakenly referred to him as Frank). Fred’s not your typical 85-year-old man. He’s vibrant, sprightly and, quite frankly, jacked! So jacked, in fact, I’d put money on Fred being able to dead lift more weight than your average 20 or 30-year-old. Forget average, perhaps more than the most well conditioned 20 or 30-year-old muscle head. If I’m wrong, at least I know a study from the University of New Hampshire has my back (perhaps not in money, but at least in scientific data).

Conventional wisdom suggests that as we age, what we were once able to do physically declines somewhat. What we were once able to lift with relative ease is now a strenuous exercise; jogs around the block that produced nary a sweat bead are now producing gobs of sweat and some serious huffing and puffing. But UNH researchers say that that’s more a function of decreased activity and less a function of age, particularly in women.

A team of researchers lead by exercise science professor Dain LaRoche had 25 young women and 24 older women take part in an eight-week exercise resistance training program that targeted the leg muscles, specifically the knee extensor muscles. The ages ranged from 18 to 33 for the young women and 65 to 84 for the older women.

After eight weeks, the researchers found that not only did the older women show increases in strength gains in their knee extensor muscles but their strength gains rivaled the young women on a percentage basis, which is to say that the percentage of older women and younger women showing increases in strength was the same.

Where things were not the same was power, which is somewhat different from strength. As the researchers define it, power is one’s ability to increase force over time, or how long it takes to go from lifting 75 pounds versus 65 pounds, for example. When comparing the younger women to the older women over the same time period, the older women registered a 10 percent increase in power, while the younger women increased their power by 50 percent.

But this finding is not indicative of their discrepancies in age, as conventional wisdom might suggest. The researchers say it’s more a function of when the older women began exercising; if they were to have started strength training at a younger age and continued doing so up to their elder years, they would likely have been able to make similar gains in power. This perhaps explains my good friend Fred’s jacked physique and his dead lifting ability.

This is great news for everyone that’s aging – which is all of us. It explains why exercise is so important not as an every once in a while activity, but as a regular, consistent activity that needs to be done every day to maintain strength and increase power now and later in life – a time that doesn’t have to be marked by frailty and feebleness.