Might be of interest that this weeks New Scientist magazine (6 Apr 2002,
pages 30--33) has an article about the effect of age on fitness. New
Scientist is very variable in it's article quality, and there are no
supporting references, but it does say some thought provoking things,
particularly:

(i) it seems possible you can't separate a `general aerobic capacity' from
the muscles being used when developing it (i.e., if you jog then you
might show much lower areobic capacity when measured on a bicycle as
opposed to on a treadmill). Thus there's potentially
large errors in existing research that has made conclusions about people's
areobic capacity using activities which are different to those in their
everyday lives.

(ii) there seems some support for a hypothesis that cells that organise
muscle repair of damage may have a limited of repair cycles. This is
motivated by observations of really extreme athletes who suddenly burn-out
after a certain number of years of very heavy exercising. Thus working out
excessively, particularly leading to soreness may be something that you
can recover from short-term but it may have a deleterous effect over
the long term.

Anyway, it's worth looking at if New Scientist is available in your
geographical area.

___cheers,_dave_________________________________________________________
www.cs.bris.ac.uk/~tweed/|`...heat generated by its microprocessors will
email:[log in to unmask] upward exponentially, reaching the power
work tel:(0117) 954-5250 |density of a nuclear reactor before 2010'-Intel

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