Correlates of individual physical activities in older adults

Although physical activity facilitates successful aging, involvement in such activity declines with age. Factors that correlate with physical activities may be used for targeting individuals for interventions and developing interventions that promote such activity in older adults. The current investigation used data from 158 community-dwelling older adults from the Accelerate study, who were administered several cognitive, health, and lifestyle measures, including a physical activity questionnaire. Participants indicated how often they engaged in ten distinct physical activities such as walking or biking. Exploratory step-wise regressions were used to determine which factors were associated with activity participation levels. Factors that repeatedly emerged were age, social networks, alcohol use, and number of medical conditions. However, it was also found that no one set of factors were consistently associated with involvement in all the physical activities. This indicates that interventions designed to increase physical activity levels in older adults should consider both the types and indices of activities to be employed.