When we talk about building fitness in middle-aged and older people, the focus is on cardio work for the heart, and weights or resistance training to build strength.

The latter is increasingly important when we age, because it’s instrumental to keeping us upright, and avoiding falls.

Both are believed to serve as protections against premature death.

But there is another element that tends to sit under the radar, and that’s flexibility. Is it, too, implicated in living longer?

A new study suggests it is – researchers found that middle-aged people with higher flexibility enjoyed reduced mortality risks.

Surprisingly, this is a new finding.

In part this is because strength training aids flexibility, by moving weights through a variety of arcs.

This has led to the belief that strength training alone (or in tandem with the range of movement undertaken in cardio exercise) is enough. Any movement is helpful.

However, flexibility is about maintaining a full range of movement, either through stretching or strength work.

The new study found that women were significantly more flexible than men.

This shouldn’t be a surprise. Women are more naturally flexible than men, because of the structure of their connective tissue.

Also, women typically focus on activities that require more flexibility and are designed to deliver greater flexibility such as yoga and Pilates.

Why is flexibility important?

Flexibility is the ability of muscles, joints, and soft tissue to move through an unrestricted, pain-free range of motion.

Some people are more flexible than others, but minimum ranges are necessary for maintaining joint and total body function.

According to the University of California, the ability of your joints to move through a full range of motion enhances your ability to function more freely.

But it’s also necessary in order “to maintain the health of cartilage and other structures within the joint with increased blood supply and nutrients to joint structures with increased quantity of synovial joint fluid”.

Also, muscles that are inflexible “tire more quickly, causing opposing muscle groups to work harder”. They’re also more prone to injury.

There’s also the fact that everything is connected. Decreased flexibility in one part of the body can lead “to abnormal stress on structures and tissues distant from the initial site of inflexibility”.

An example of this “is that tendonitis in the knee can be related to calf tightness”.

The new study

Researchers from the Exercise Medicine Clinic in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, recruited more than 3000 participants, aged 46-65.

Two-thirds of the participants were men.

Their flexibility was measured and scored. This involved a combination of the passive range of motion in 20 movements, involving seven different joints, resulting in a score range of 0-80.

The results were then ranked on a new scale called the ‘Flexindex’. The higher the score, the more flexible the participants.

Flexindex was 35 per cent higher in women than men.

During an average follow-up of 12.9 years, 9.6 per cent of the 302 participants died – 224 men and 78 women.

Flexindex revealed an inverse relationship to the risk of dying. This means: The higher the score, the lower the chance of dying prematurely.

 After taking age, body mass index, and health status into account, men and women with a low Flexindex had a 1.87- and 4.78-times higher risk of dying, respectively, than those with a high Flexindex.

Dr Claudio Gil S. Araújo, corresponding author of the new paper, said:

“Being aerobically fit and strong and having good balance have been previously associated with low mortality.

“We were able to show that reduced body flexibility is also related to poor survival in middle-aged men and women.”

Because flexibility tends to decrease with ageing, Araújoit suggested that an assessment of body flexibility be included in health and fitness check-ups.