Abstract
Many studies have investigated how aging decreases human strength and endurance. However, understanding the effect of aging on human motor ability requires more than knowledge of the separate temporal profile of individual motor function because the structure of human motor ability is multi-dimensional. We address the effect of aging on the multi-dimensional structure of human motor ability by investigating the performance records of athletes in track events across various age groups. We collected the performance records of 446 top-level decathletes whose ages ranged from 20 to 74, and performed a principal component analysis of the records in 100m, 1500m, and 400m races, which require strength, endurance, and the mixture of both, respectively. Our analysis shows that aging results in a substantial and sudden change in the motor ability structure, contrasting sharply with the gradual decrease in performance in each track event. The rapid structural change develops around the age of 50, which is much earlier than the “breakpoint” of 70 years suggested in multiple previous studies. Our findings indicate that the structural change in motor ability can significantly precede the failure in the overall motor performance.
Highlights
Maintaining motor performance at an appropriate level is a common desire among humans, which cannot be fulfilled owing to numerous factors, such as disease, injury, and aging
The underlying mechanism of aging has not been fully clarified despite extensive studies in various fields, most studies in the literature agree that aging-related complications are not the result of chronological age; a mixture of various factors induces aging, and decreases the overall motor performance [2,3,4]
We address the effect of aging on human motor ability structure by extracting the principal components (PCs) from the 100m, 400m, and 1500m run records of 446 top-level male decathletes whose ages ranged from 20 to 74
Summary
Maintaining motor performance at an appropriate level is a common desire among humans, which cannot be fulfilled owing to numerous factors, such as disease, injury, and aging. Among these factors, aging is the one currently affecting all humans. Strihler characterized aging as the structural and functional deterioration of the overall neuromuscular system, and the corresponding degradation of the physio-motor abilities [1]. The fact that aging is affected by numerous factors including chronological age, genetics, environment and lifestyle has hampered systematic and quantitative research on the effect of aging on human motor ability; controlled experiments with human participants have been challenging. The decline in the maximum rate of oxygen consumption due to aging depends on the amount of training [7, 8], and the aerobic capacity of highly trained octogenarians is substantially higher than that of their untrained counterparts [9]
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