Sports medicine is somewhat focused on specific functional aspects of health, and so it was probably inevitable that factions in that community found the measures of life span and even health span to be lacking. Here, for example, a researcher proposes movement span as a useful concept, the period of life in which one is capable of navigating the world easily - the inverse of physical frailty, more or less. Interestingly, life span and health span in nematode worm studies of aging and longevity are already in practice forms of movement span, as manual or automated measures of worm movement is how researchers assess that the worms remain healthy and alive.
How we conceptualize aging shapes how we measure it, how we respond to it, and ultimately how we experience it. For much of the past century, longevity served as the dominant metric of successful aging. As population health science matured, researchers and clinicians began emphasizing not merely how long people live but also how well they live, giving rise to the concept of health span, which redirected attention from mortality to morbidity. Yet even health span fails to capture something more immediate and experientially salient: the degree to which an individual can move through the world with ease, confidence, and adaptive capacity.
This opinion proposes movement span as a third, conceptually distinct dimension of aging, addressing the trajectory of functional movement capacity over the life course. Movement span is not reducible to either life span or health span, though it is deeply related to both. Its decline may precede the onset of diagnosable chronic disease or may be driven instead by patterns of reduced demand on the sensorimotor system. Understanding movement span has significant implications for how clinicians assess patients, how public health frameworks are constructed, and how individuals respond to their own aging.
Link: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jshs.2026.101150
View the full article at FightAging
