The biomarkers of aging a $101M study is tracking — and what moves them

Biological age doesn’t show up as one number. It shows up in a handful of things you can measure — how hard you can grip, how fast you can walk, how much oxygen you can use, how much muscle you carry. A $101M study is tracking exactly these. And in a head-to-head trial, one training method moved them harder than weights, in a fraction of the time.

Aging is measurable — and specific

The longevity field has largely stopped talking about “anti-aging” in the abstract and started measuring it. A short list of biomarkers predicts, with surprising accuracy, how long and how well a person will live. They’re the same markers the ASU Team Healthspan entry in the $101M XPRIZE Healthspan study is tracking in its participants: grip strength, gait speed, VO₂ max, and body composition, alongside immune and cognitive function.

Here’s the part most people miss: nearly all of them respond to one thing.

The markers that predict how well you age

Grip strength. It sounds trivial. It isn’t. Grip strength is one of the most reliable predictors of all-cause mortality in older adults — a proxy for total-body strength and, by extension, independence. When grip goes, the ability to carry, catch, and hold yourself up goes with it.

Gait speed. How fast you walk has been called the “sixth vital sign.” It bundles together leg strength, balance, and cardiovascular capacity into a single number, and it forecasts everything from hospitalization risk to lifespan. Faster walkers live longer — not because walking fast is magic, but because it reflects a body that still works.

VO₂ max. Your maximum rate of oxygen use is among the strongest predictors of longevity ever measured — a low VO₂ max carries risk on par with smoking. It’s usually thought of as a cardio number, but strength training moves it too, especially the kind that keeps intensity high.

Muscle mass. Muscle is the organ of longevity: it’s your metabolic engine, your glucose sink, your protein reserve in illness, and your insurance against the fall that ends independence. After your 30s you lose it by default — unless you train to keep it.

Immune and cognitive function. Harder to train directly — but not unrelated. Muscle tissue is metabolically and immunologically active, and the same intense, measured training that builds strength is increasingly linked to better cognitive and metabolic outcomes with age.

The common thread: strength training moves almost all of them

Grip, gait, VO₂ max, muscle — the throughline is resistance training done hard enough to matter. Not walking. Not stretching. Progressive, intense strength work is the single most efficient lever on the biomarkers of aging. The problem has always been that “hard enough to matter” is also hard enough to hurt — and hard to measure, and time-consuming.

That’s the exact problem adaptive resistance was built to solve.

The proof: ARX vs. weights, head to head

In an independent 12-week study commissioned by the American Council on Exercise (ACE), conducted at Western Colorado University and published in the International Journal of Research in Exercise Physiology, one group trained on ARX adaptive resistance machines and the other on traditional weights. The ARX group didn’t just keep up. On the markers that define healthy aging, they pulled ahead:

• 90% greater strength gains than the weight-training group
• 3.5× greater VO₂ max improvement
• 2× the lean muscle gain
• 2.5× more fat loss

And here is the line that matters most for anyone over 50 with a life to live: they did it in 72% less training time. More of every result that moves the biomarkers of aging — in under a third of the hours. That’s not a marginal edge. That’s a different category of tool.

Why? Because adaptive resistance is motorized, computer-controlled resistance that matches your exact force on every inch of every rep — loading the muscle maximally through the whole range, with no weight stack to fight and a precise force reading on every repetition. Maximum stimulus, measured, in minutes.

Why the research world is building on it

You don’t have to take ARX’s word for the category. The exercise arm of the ASU Team Healthspan study — scientists competing for a $101M prize to reverse biological aging — is built on adaptive resistance training, and ARX machines are used in that arm. When people whose entire job is moving these biomarkers chose how to train older adults, they reached for the category ARX pioneered. That study hasn’t published results yet; when it does, we’ll cover it. But the choice itself is telling.

What it means for you

If you run a studio, gym, or clinic: the biomarkers of aging are the fastest-growing reason people walk through a fitness door — longevity clients, GLP-1 users protecting muscle, adults over 50 who want to stay independent. Measured, time-efficient strength is what they’re looking for, and it’s the best revenue per square foot in fitness. See ARX for business.

If you’re building your own healthspan: you can train every marker on this list at home, in two 15-minute sessions a week, with a precise number on every rep. See ARX for longevity — or read the full research story.