Emma Maria Mazzenga, 5\u20191\u201d and 128 pounds, typically trains about three times a week. Photo \/ Claudia Gori, The Washington Post<\/p>\n
But scientists in the United States and Italy recently began to wonder just how singular she might be. So, as part of a major, ongoing study of elite older athletes, they began measuring her cardiorespiratory fitness and muscle function.<\/p>\n
The goal of their research is to tease out which aspects of growing older are inexorable and which might be open to slowing or other change, especially if people exercise.<\/p>\n
Delving into that topic, two studies of Mazzenga, one published last month in the Journal of Applied Physiology, and the second in the same journal this month, find her ageing to be both exceptional and commonplace. In many ways, her body works as well as that of an active 20- or 30-year-old. But not in all ways.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat we are learning is that, definitely, exercise training is a major thing we should focus on to change the ageing process,\u201d said Simone Porcelli, an exercise physiologist at the University of Pavia in Italy and a senior author of the new studies.<\/p>\n
In that context, he added, \u201cEmma is quite inspiring.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mazzenga, who lives in Padua, Italy, first tried sprinting at the University of Padua when she was about 20 and studying biology, Porcelli said. Enjoying the sport, she continued to train and compete after graduation off and on for another decade, until work and family responsibilities intervened.<\/p>\n
Mazzenga has multiple age-group world records to her name. Photo \/ Claudia Gori, The Washington Post<\/p>\n
For about 15 years, she didn\u2019t race or formally exercise much, until, at about age 45, with her children grown, she decided to start sprinting again.<\/p>\n
Today, at 5 foot 1 and 58kg, she typically trains about three times a week, warming up with a few minutes of gentle jogging, followed by challenging sprints of various lengths. Sometimes she runs hard for 60m, rests for around three minutes, and sprints another 60m, repeating the whole sequence until she tires. Other days, she lengthens the intervals to 400m or more, with six or seven minutes between each.<\/p>\n
The bulk of these workouts involve high-intensity interval training, meaning the exercise effort is draining, but the duration short. Her training sessions rarely last more than an hour, and she almost never goes for long runs or completes other sustained aerobic exercise. She does walk outside almost every day and occasionally performs light resistance exercise.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe\u2019s mainly been a sprinter for most of her adult life,\u201d said Christopher Sundberg, a professor of geriatrics and medicine at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and co-senior author of the new studies. \u201cThat\u2019s unusual. It\u2019s partly what makes her\u201d – and her ageing body – \u201cso interesting.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mazzenga recently visited the University of Pavia in Italy for a day of testing. Photo \/ Simone Porcelli, The Washington Post<\/p>\n
In 2024, a month after she set her 200m indoor record and two weeks before she lowered the 200m outdoor world mark, Mazzenga, then 91, visited the University of Padua\u2019s exercise lab. There, Porcelli and his colleagues used a bicycle, knee extension machine, muscle biopsy and other tests to check her aerobic capacity, cardiac output and leg muscles\u2019 size, strength, power and underlying function.<\/p>\n
Then they compared her numbers against similar data from younger people. (There\u2019s little information from other athletic 90-year-old women, because few have been studied.)<\/p>\n
The results suggest Mazzenga is ageing admirably. Her overall aerobic fitness resembled that of athletic women almost half her age, and her ability to take in oxygen and start passing it along to her muscles was even better, comparable to what\u2019s seen in active 30-year-olds.<\/p>\n
Her muscles also teemed with healthy connections to nerve cells in the spinal cord. These connections often wither with age, reducing the ability of muscles to receive and respond to messages from the brain. But few of Mazzenga\u2019s nerve connections had died. Just as impressive, her muscles\u2019 mitochondria – the tiny organelles inside cells that absorb oxygen and transform it into energy – were exceptionally robust, functioning like those of 20-year-olds.<\/p>\n
But in some ways, Mazzenga showed her age. Her legs\u2019 muscle mass was somewhat diminished, as would be expected in a woman of her age, and her ability to generate force while lifting weights was similar to that of people in their 70s or 80s. There also was substantial atrophy in her fast-twitch muscle fibres, a condition often seen during ageing.<\/p>\n
During her training, Mazzenga warms up with a few minutes of gentle jogging, followed by sprints of various lengths. Photo \/ Claudia Gori, The Washington Post<\/p>\n
At the same time, her slow-twitch muscle fibres, which are involved in sustained aerobic activity, were unusually large and healthy for someone her age.<\/p>\n
The fibre results are somewhat baffling, Sundberg said. Why didn\u2019t Mazzenga\u2019s intense sprint training, which activates fast-twitch fibres, protect those fibres from atrophy? Why did it, instead, seem to bulk up her slow-twitch fibres? Are those enlarged fibres compensating for the atrophied fast-twitch ones? \u201cWe just don\u2019t know right now,\u201d Sundberg said.<\/p>\n
The study raises other questions, too. Are Mazzenga\u2019s talent, durability and longevity due primarily to her training or to her genes, personality or other factors, such as her diet or social network? (She eats lightly, mainly fish, eggs and vegetables, but has steak if she wants.)<\/p>\n
Also, is her training, which consists almost exclusively of brief, hard sprinting, the ideal approach to successful ageing? The researchers are also studying older champion distance runners, who spend many hours every week doing prolonged aerobic exercise and only occasional sprinting. Is their route to ageing comparable or better?<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re testing different types of exercise interventions,\u201d Sundberg said. \u201cThe aim is to identify the golden combo of exercise that will help the most\u201d with healthy ageing. \u201cI don\u2019t know if we\u2019ll ever have the full answer, but I think we\u2019ll get closer to the truth. That\u2019s the goal.\u201d<\/p>\n
The scientists recently invited Mazzenga back to the lab and repeated all of the tests from 2024. They want to see whether and how her physiology has changed from ages 91 to almost 93. Results should be published soon.<\/p>\n
Until then, \u201cone of the best things\u201d that such studies \u201cshow the general public is that it is not too late to start exercising,\u201d said Hirofumi Tanaka, director of the Cardiovascular Ageing Research Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin. He studies older athletes but was not involved in the new research.<\/p>\n
Mazzenga, like many athletes he studies, didn\u2019t begin or return to regular exercise until relatively late in life, Tanaka said, and then bloomed. There\u2019s inspiration and promise in that arc. \u201cMasters athletes stand as living proof that passion, perseverance and discipline know no age limit,\u201d he said, \u201cand demonstrate to us what is possible in the ageing process.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Emma Maria Mazzenga, 5\u20191\u201d and 128 pounds, typically trains about three times a week. Photo \/ Claudia Gori,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":475081,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[35877,7127,806,1975,3146,790,156,29420,9787,28419,71,2964,1364,42123,11285,239389,2510,46521,111,139,86407,69,9090,147,6180,10536,12810,6923,377],"class_list":["post-475080","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-35877","tag-age","tag-as","tag-at","tag-earth","tag-emma","tag-entertainment","tag-fastest","tag-female","tag-fit","tag-from","tag-half","tag-her","tag-holder","tag-learning","tag-mazzenga","tag-multiple","tag-muscles","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nonagenarian","tag-nz","tag-records","tag-science","tag-shes","tag-someone","tag-sprinting","tag-what","tag-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/475080","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=475080"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/475080\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/475081"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=475080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=475080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=475080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}