Selective Maintenance of Motor Performance in Older Adults From Long-Lasting Sport Practice.
OBJECTIVE
Decline of motor performance in older individuals affects their quality of life. Understanding the contribution of sport-related training in advanced ages might help to attenuate motor performance decay as one gets older. The purpose of our study was to evaluate the extent to which long-lasting training in running or sport-specific skills during old age preserves motor performance in different motor tasks.


METHODS
Older runners and tennis players with at least 10 years of training were assessed as were age-matched and young exercisers. Performance was evaluated for 6 motor tasks requiring different functions of sensorimotor control expected to decline with aging.


RESULTS
Analysis revealed that runners had increased aerobic fitness in comparison with the other older participants and that they presented similar performance to older exercisers in the motor tasks. Tennis players outperformed the other groups of older participants on coincident timing and simple reaction time and achieved similar performance to the young group on the timing task.


CONCLUSIONS
These results suggest selective maintenance of task-specific processing through extensive practice of tennis-related motor skills in older adults.
a State University of Londrina.
Juliana Bayeux
JB
Dascal
b University of São Paulo.
Luis Augusto
LA
Teixeira
D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D000375:Aging / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009048:Motor Skills / Q000502:physiology*; D010809:Physical Fitness; D004856:Postural Balance; D011214:Practice, Psychological; D011788:Quality of Life; D011930:Reaction Time; D012420:Running / Q000502:physiology*; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis; D013715:Tennis / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
Aerobic; exercise; gerontology; sport