How old are you? Before you jump to the quick answer—i.e. the one you’ve celebrated every year with a progressively increasing number of candles and cake—know that you have another, even more important age: your fitness age.
First created by researchers from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, your fitness age takes your respiratory health into account and is made up of different components including your heart rate, waist circumference, exercise routine, and more. Go ahead and calculate it here.
Okay, so why should you even care about the number that pops up on your screen? Because it may predict how long you’ll live, the researchers found, to an even better extent than your actual age can. The lower your fitness age is from your actual age, the higher your chances of living a long life. Plus, if you’re not getting the number you want when you plug in your stats, up your exercise—your fitness age can decrease over time. I’m going to go ahead and take this news as my permission to still put twenty-something candles on my cake well into my sixties. #fitforlife
