Running for My Life: Why Power Matters for Healthy Aging After 40

Weekly Wisdom #60

September 11, 2026

Speed and power are the hallmarks of athleticism. These two attributes, above all others, separate the best from the rest.

But they matter for longevity and health span, too.

Power—the ability to produce force quickly—is increasingly being recognized as an important marker of healthy aging. In fact, recent research suggests that muscular power may be an even stronger predictor of mortality risk than strength alone.

This being the case, I was a bit alarmed at the start of 2026 to discover I had lost the ability to sprint.

I Was Running. But I Wasn't Running Fast.

Sure, we run a lot in CrossFit. But in most workouts, the run is the rest.

Strategically, it is often more effective to use the run for recovery because other movements like box jumps and wall balls spike your heart rate. The run is your opportunity to bring it back down.

So, as often as I ran, I rarely sprinted.

When HeeHee and I went to Almond Park to practice sprinting, I discovered that my legs no longer moved fast enough to reach maximal heart rate.

I had lost the ability to be fast.

My legs moved like an old man's.

This was disconcerting.

Relearning How to Sprint

Thus began my quest to recover my ability to sprint.

Retraining my leg muscles to be explosive took a bit of time. We used a lot of drills from the Parisi Speed School. We also used bounding. The combination of these practices helped retrain my nervous system to move quickly.

We continue to use them in our sprinting warm-ups to prepare ourselves for maximal sprint efforts.

Every week since January, we have gone to the park to sprint.

And I'm pleased to report that I can now consistently hit speeds that put me into my max heart-rate zone.

I may never be a world-class sprinter, but I can reach speeds that take me to my physiological limits.

Our focus is quality, not distance.

We sprint until we reach our top gear and wind it down the moment our output begins to wane. We rest long enough to fully recover between sprints and only continue as long as our speed improves.

As soon as we are too tired to improve upon the previous sprint, we call it a day.

It is fun and invigorating—and, I believe, vitally important to our health and longevity.

Why I'm Training for Power

These days, my training is increasingly focused on speed and power production.

That means explosive lifts, sprinting, jumping and throwing.

Strength remains an important component of power, of course. You cannot express force quickly if you cannot produce force in the first place. But for me, strength is increasingly a means to an end: I want to be able to use that strength quickly.

That matters as we age.

Strength helps you pick up a heavy object. Power helps you react when you trip, climb stairs quickly, catch yourself when you lose your balance or move your body rapidly when circumstances demand it.

Healthy aging isn't just about staying alive longer. Health span is about preserving our physical capabilities—our ability to move confidently, remain independent and continue doing the things we enjoy.

For adults over 40, that makes power an important part of functional fitness.

And it doesn't necessarily mean sprinting.

Depending on the person, power training might include jumping, medicine-ball throws, kettlebell swings, Olympic-lift variations or simply learning to perform an appropriate movement more explosively.

Good coaching matters here. The goal isn't recklessness. It is finding safe, appropriate ways to keep asking the body to move quickly.

What If We Lose What We Stop Using?

I believe there is mounting evidence that training for power produces signalling effects on systems, organs and even individual cells that may change the way we age.

And even if I am wrong about the effects at the cellular level, the functional payoff of power training in terms of real-world performance justifies the emphasis.

This sort of training also just feels great.

High-intensity, low-volume training leaves you feeling strong, refreshed and not at all beat up or fatigued.

But I wanted to understand the science better.

I recently spent some time listening to and reading several resources exploring muscle, power and aging:

Exercise Erases 57% of Muscle Aging

The First Thing You Lose After 40

Your Organs Don't Age First

You're Not Getting Weaker After 60 — You're Getting Slow

And a 2025 study published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings examining whether muscular power or muscular strength was the better predictor of mortality in middle-aged and older adults.

https://www.mayoclinicproceedings.org/article/S0025-6196(25)00100-4/abstract?

After working my way through these resources, I asked AI to summarize and evaluate their claims. Then I asked it to bring together the areas where the sources converged and identify what was scientifically defensible based on the state of the evidence today.

Here is what Chat had to say:

Don't Just Stay Strong. Stay Powerful.

For years, the advice for healthy aging has been simple:

Keep your muscle and stay strong.

Good advice.

But increasingly, the science suggests there is more to the story.

One physical quality declines even faster than strength and may be particularly important to maintaining our capabilities as we age:

Power.

Strength is how much force you can produce. Power is how quickly you can produce it.

That distinction matters. If you trip on a curb, you don't have three seconds to grind out a maximum effort. You have a fraction of a second to react, generate force and catch yourself.

That is a power problem.

And power appears to fade surprisingly quickly with age.

Research suggests that rapid force production, contraction speed and the fast motor units responsible for explosive movement can begin declining decades before we think of ourselves as "old." In later life, power also appears to decline faster than maximum strength.

More strikingly, a 2025 study in Mayo Clinic Proceedings followed nearly 3,900 middle-aged and older adults for more than a decade. Low relative muscular power was more strongly associated with mortality than low relative strength.

That doesn't prove that power training makes you live longer.

But it suggests that power may tell us something important about the health and resilience of the human system.

Now that picture is becoming even more interesting.

In a 2026 Nature Aging study, researchers looked inside human muscle, examining gene expression along with metabolites and lipids. Older adults showed numerous age-related differences, particularly involving cellular respiration and energy metabolism.

But in trained older adults, about half of those age-related differences were absent, leaving their muscle with molecular profiles that more closely resembled those of younger adults.

In other words, exercise may do more than preserve the amount of muscle we have. Sustained physical training appears to be associated with preservation of aspects of the biological quality and energy-producing machinery of muscle itself.

And muscle isn't merely an engine that moves your skeleton. It is also a signalling organ, releasing molecules called myokines that communicate with other tissues throughout the body.

This leads to an intriguing, but still unproven, hypothesis.

Because aging appears to disproportionately affect our large, fast motor units, perhaps their deterioration does more than make us slower and less powerful. Changes in how muscle functions and communicates might contribute to some of the wider physiological decline we associate with aging.

We don't yet know.

Fortunately, we don't need to wait for the answer before acting.

We already have good reasons to preserve muscle, build strength and maintain cardiovascular fitness. The emerging evidence suggests we should add another priority:

Don't stop moving fast.

Depending on your abilities, that could mean jumps, medicine-ball throws, kettlebell swings, Olympic-lift variations or short sprints.

None of this requires recklessness. Power training can be scaled to almost any age and ability.

Healthy aging isn't just about preserving the machinery.

It's about preserving what that machinery can do.

Stay muscular. Stay strong.

But don't forget to stay fast and powerful.

Use It or Lose It

Here is the line from my AI-assisted research that struck me most:

***Aging seems to preferentially erode capacities that we stop demanding from the body.***

That certainly describes my experience with sprinting.

I hadn't stopped exercising. I hadn't stopped running. I hadn't stopped doing CrossFit.

I had simply stopped asking my body to run fast.

And apparently, my body got the message.

At Empower here in Vancouver, we spend a lot of time thinking about what functional fitness should look like as we age. Strength matters. Cardiovascular fitness matters. Mobility matters. Muscle matters.

But so does the ability to move quickly and powerfully.

If we want to preserve our health span, resilience, confidence and independence into our 50s, 60s, 70s and beyond, perhaps we need to keep reminding our bodies what they are capable of.

Sometimes that means lifting something heavy.

And sometimes it means going to the park and running for your life.