Johanna Quaas, a nonagenarian dynamo and the world's oldest gymnast, stands as an inspirational figure defying age through her dedication to diet and exercise. This article delves into the secrets behind her longevity and athleticism, exploring her plant-based diet, rigorous training regimen, and positive mindset.
A Gymnastics Icon
Quaas, born on November 20, 1925, in Hohenmölsen, Germany, has been involved in gymnastics for the better part of three-quarters of a century, with a brief hiatus around the World War II years. She participated in her first competition at the age of nine. A former team handball champion in East Germany, she later won the German Seniors gymnastics title for 11 straight years (2000-11), age 75-86. In 2015, when the International Gymnastics Hall of Fame honored her at its annual dinner in Oklahoma City, she said, “You are never too old to learn something new.”
The Internet is full of video clips of Quaas’s routines, all of them defying her age, all of them a marvel, leaving one and all on either side of age 95 to feel like they’re just the sorriest couch potato ever to tumble off the turnip truck.
Viral Sensation
Quaas became known in 2012 through several YouTube videos, which showed her during performances at the Tournament of Champions in the Cottbus Lausitz-Arena. The videos developed into viral clips and reached several million views within a very short time, followed by numerous television and newspaper reports in German and international media, including reports on the American television stations NBC and ABC as well as a performance on Gottschalk Live. In recent videos, she does somersaults, headstands, and lithe leaps and turns. With arms bearing her entire weight on the parallel bars, she holds her body horizontally or upside-down, pausing for long, graceful moments before lowering herself again. It’s more than impressive-it’s astounding. Though she’s in her 90s, Quaas would put most young people to shame with her athleticism.
Quaas's Diet
Quaas is a big proponent of a plant-based diet and loves her greens. While not a total vegan, her diet is mostly composed of fruits and vegetables. Quaas revealed that her diet is mostly composed of fruits and vegetables.
Read also: The Hoxsey Diet
Quaas’s secret formula: her green diet, moderation (eat till full, then stop), and plenty of exercise (gymnastics three or four days a week, with an occasional sauna and a dip in the pool). Oh, and all of it covered by a sunny disposition.
Exercise Regime
Other than a brief hiatus around the World War II years, Quaas has been a gymnast for the better part of three-quarters of a century. The passion has shaped her life, helped her stay healthy, won her a bunch of rewards. She took a break from gymnastics in 1962 but resumed in 1982. Quaas performed a floor-and-beam routine in Rome in 2012. Shortly after, Johanna was inducted into the Guinness Book of World Records as the Oldest Gymnast at 86 years. Ensuingly, Quaas’s videos performing at the competition made their way to YouTube, and the rest is history.
Quaas revealed that her diet is mostly composed of fruits and vegetables. She also revealed despite her age, she does gymnastics training for an hour every day.
Quaas’s moves these days are slow, deliberate, form perfect, videos of her sets essentially a “how to” instruction manual. Her hair is white, her face a rich mosaic of story lines, and her sense of self that of an elderly woman who proudly tells anyone, “My heart is young.”
Gymnastics for Seniors
Seniors in particular benefit from gymnastics. But at the moment it is difficult to participate in fitness courses. The oldest gymnast in the world, Johanna Quaas (born in 1925), presents therefore on this site weekly new gymnastic exercises that you can already do in bed in the morning to start the day fit and mobile. These bed exercises can be a gentle way for senior citizens at home or in nursing homes to build muscles, maintain or increase mobility and keep fit.
Read also: Walnut Keto Guide
The Mind-Body Connection
Quaas’s secret formula: her green diet, moderation (eat till full, then stop), and plenty of exercise (gymnastics three or four days a week, with an occasional sauna and a dip in the pool). Oh, and all of it covered by a sunny disposition.
No real magic there, right? Hardly revolutionary TB12 live-long-and-prosper stuff or that sensational gizmo that sells for $59.95 on QVC, promising those ever-elusive six-pack abs. Ever notice how those gizmos always fit neatly under the bed, so we can tuck ‘em away and act like we never saw them?
Expert Opinion
“I mean, look at her, doing the parallel bars, and her tumbling,” said Dr. Kristen Gunning, an internist, recently watching one of the Quaas videos. “She’s amazing.” Gunning is a member of the Bulfinch Medical Group located on the Massachusetts General Hospital campus, and she specializes, in part, in geriatric patients, albeit not those who routinely wake up each day and spring cartwheels across the kitchen floor. A gymnast in her childhood, what Gunning tells her elderly patients, and those middle-age and younger, fits Quaas’s story: Stay active both of body and mind, maintain proper diet and weight, and especially try not to be deterred today by thinking that you’ll start doing all the right health and fitness things tomorrow. “Like, say, patients who are carrying 30 extra pounds,” noted Gunning. “They’re always planning, ‘Well, once I get through tax season, then I’ll be able to exercise.’ Or, ‘Once I get through this, I’ll be able to do that … once my kids are older, and I’m not running around like crazy, I can get to that.’ ” It’s especially the extra weight, Gunning reminds them, that adds years, packs on the health risks. “It ages you a lot,” she said, ticking off the added risk of cancer, high-blood-pressure, diabetes, etc. “The inactivity ages you.”
Too often, noted Gunning, we are the greatest obstacles standing in way to our better selves, especially when it comes to trying smarter diets, new health regimens. “A lot of patients stay in their own way, truthfully,” she said. ‘If I think of my own patients in their 90s … some often look younger than my patients in their 60s. Having taken care of patients [for some 25] years, there seems to be a split, somewhere in your late 60s/early 70s, where one group of individuals is physiologically 20 years older than the other group of individuals.” Some of that, noted Gunning, is purely random, such as older patients that develop a devastating illness unrelated to their fitness level, diet or good health practices. “But so often it’s lifestyle,” she said. “It’s diet. It’s exercise. It’s keeping yourself mentally sharp, keeping yourself physically in shape, just socially keeping up - such as people who can make friends throughout their lives. No question, people who’ve lived in moderation have an advantage.”
Gunning noted two of her current vital 90-somethings, one a woman who only until recently regularly conducted tours at the Museum of Fine Arts, another a 91-year-old Korean War veteran whose passion is to help those steering through recovery at Alcoholics Anonymous. “He’s in the [Holyoke] Soldiers’ Home now, and COVID-negative, thankfully,” she said. “Once they give him an ounce of freedom, the very first thing he’s going to do is go back to sponsoring people at AA meetings.” Amid the ongoing pandemic, said Gunning, COVID-19 has claimed but one of her patients. A significant number of elderly in her care, though, have succumbed to the isolation and associated inactivity the pandemic has forced on so many of us of all ages. “I’ve lost so many seniors,” said a somber Gunning. “It’s the social isolation. It’s the lack of activity. They’re losing ground in their physical stamina. Just not being able to walk the same distances. They’re shriveling up and it’s truly awful.”
Read also: Weight Loss with Low-FODMAP
The Science of Aging
Biological pathways we’re just beginning to understand give some people extraordinary resilience to aging, while leading others to become worn down in their 50s. This summer, the Institute welcomes new director Toren Finkel, who will lead a basic and translational research effort on aging that is unprecedented at Pitt. “It’s becoming possible to think about intervening in the rate of aging, pharmacologically. You could really slow the rate that you age, and thereby, slow the rate that you develop all of these diseases. As we age, a lot of things tend to go wrong in our bodies. Our cells’ housekeepers fail to show up. Our energy sensors sense wrong. Our nondividing cells sit there and cause trouble. The telomeres-caps on the ends of DNA-wear down. Genes get switched on and off at the wrong times. What scientists are beginning to realize is that these processes are often connected, that they can show up as many different diseases that have a lot in common, and that certain points along these pathways offer promising drug targets. “Toren Finkel is a fantastic researcher and wonderful human being who’s going to fit into our culture extremely well,” says Steven Shapiro, the executive vice president and chief medical and scientific officer of UPMC. “He has not only a great understanding of basic science, but an urgency to translate this into clinical programs and help patients. He spent the first half of his career defining these pathways. With the renowned Charles Reynolds, UPMC Endowed Professor of Geriatric Psychiatry, at the helm for many years, the Institute already offers top-notch clinical care for Western Pennsylvania elders and caregivers. It educates professionals and laypeople in geriatrics. Finkel will expand the Institute’s investigations in geroscience, the study of the relationship between aging and disease. An interesting thing about people who survive nearly a century or longer is that they tend to remain in good health for most of their lives. “Your DNA is repaired. Your mitochondria are strong. You avoid developing that cancer in the first place, you avoid developing that lung fibrosis, you avoid developing that coronary disease,” says Mark Gladwin, who holds the Jack D. “We’re not trying to make people live beyond 120,” he adds. “But wouldn’t it be great if you could live a strong, healthy life until you’re 95 to 120 and die peacefully in your sleep? In the United States today, there are 46 million people age 65 or older, a number expected to double to 98 million by 2060-nearly a quarter of the country’s population. residents will require skilled nursing care, a 75 percent increase from 2010. This isn’t just happening in this country. Caring for these folks can be difficult. More than 90 percent of elderly people today have at least one chronic health problem, and three-quarters have at least two. health care dollars. Industry has caught on to the promise of anti-aging drugs. A small study by the drug company Novartis made headlines in late 2014 when it found that giving a drug called rapamycin to elderly people boosted their response to the flu vaccine. “[Geroscience] really started to gain traction in the last five years. There’s a lot of interest in trying to look at common themes across the system so that we can be able to treat aging more systemically and less from a disease-specific approach,” says Fabrisia Ambrosio, an associate professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation who has helped nurture basic aging research at the Aging Institute for the past several years. “Why is it that over time our cells seem to default toward this more dysfunctional nature? Finkel and his colleagues are determined to find out. The son of a NASA physicist, Finkel majored in physics. But thanks to an inspiring professor, the biology bug bit him. As an MD/PhD, Finkel tried his hand at molecular biology bench research, mentored by physicist-turned-biologist Wally Gilbert, shortly before Gilbert jointly won the 1980 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Finkel first made his name in 1995 with a paper in Science describing his lab’s discovery that reactive oxygen species (ROS) within the cell, specifically hydrogen peroxide, are actually important in cell communications. This was a surprise. For decades, these molecules were thought to be purely destructive, to be gotten rid of, pronto, with antioxidant foods and pills. “Our work provided an explanation for why it may not be so good for you to just completely scavenge off oxidants,” Finkel says. The paper has been cited more than 2,000 times. At that time, Finkel didn’t consider himself an aging expert. Then Nature asked him to write a review of aging research to appear in 2003. The editors knew he was an outsider. Finkel soon steered his lab toward questions of aging in mammals. In any complex system, be it a spaceship or a cell, maintenance is a must. One crucial kind of cellular housekeeping is called autophagy-literally, self-eating. It’s a process in which cells break down and reuse their own damaged or aged components in response to stress. Autophagy recovers energy and resources while clearing away useless organelles, membranes, and protein. As autophagy slows with age, though, debris can accumulate, and evidence suggests that cancer, impaired immunity, and neurodegenerative disease can result. Finkel is studying the latter, a type of autophagy in which mitochondria are the objects recycled. The descendants of ancient symbiotic bacteria, these cylindrical organelles are the cell’s power plants, and they’re also important in cell signaling, metabolism, and trafficking. There is an unpleasant but effective way to activate autophagy: a near-starvation diet. Cells normally scavenge their own damaged components for energy; if they sense starvation, they go on a scavenging frenzy. Calorie-restricted diets are known to dramatically increase life span in yeast, fruit flies, nematodes, and mice. “I went to a lot of meetings recently, and all the big shot scientists-everybody I know-is on this calorie-restriction diet,” he says. “Of course we all want to live a happy life,” Chen says. “You tell me I cannot eat cheeseburgers, I can only eat one meal a day-that’s kind of hard. That’s why we’re trying to see whether we can come up with a therapy approach, maybe a pill or small compound inhibitors … that can still achieve the same goal here. Chen, who is also director of Pitt's Small Molecule Therapeutics Center, is well equipped to help with the search. The center includes libraries of molecules that can be tested by the thousands-first virtually, via supercomputer, then with real-life assays-for various functions, like stimulating autophagy. Another aspect of cellular housekeeping is DNA repair. This, too, is a constant necessity. DNA is always under assault from one thing or another, be it oxidative stress, replication errors, botched corrections, tobacco and alcohol, air pollution, or infections. Mutated DNA can lead to cancer or simply malfunctioning cells. Fortunately, we have enzymes that read and repair our DNA. Stronger DNA repair systems could mean better resistance to age-related complications in general, so they’re something we’d like to learn to shore up as well. Pitt has one of the strongest groups in the world dedicated to understanding DNA repair and genome stability. This summer, Aditi Gurkar from the Scripps Research Institute in Florida will join Pitt as an assistant professor of medicine. “Until now, we have not found anything that can keep our DNA completely safe. That’s almost impossible-in fact, it’s not good for us,” Gurkar says, pointing out that DNA mutation allows for adaptation and evolution. Gurkar’s research focuses on the fact that repairing DNA damage costs the cell a lot of energy, which is supplied by mitochondria. Under normal circumstances, mitochondria are recycled as needed (mitophagy!), with a process that keeps destructive ROS at a safely low level. But when DNA requires constant repairs, there is an ongoing demand for the intracellular energy-transfer molecule ATP, and the cell halts its ordinary recycling of mitochondria to save energy. It is perhaps not surprising that the many processes that control the creation, folding, and destruction of proteins (an aspect of cellular housekeeping known as proteostasis) can go wrong. Protein folding alone is an immensely complex process that challenges the powers of supercomputers to model. Proteins tend to misfold more with age, and age-related diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s involve the buildup of clumps of nonfunctional proteins. It’s the job of autophagy to recycle those botched proteins, so stimulating that might help. “Improving the body’s repair processes, either at the nucleus with DNA or [outside the nucleus], are really hot areas in aging biology,” Finkel says. In 2013, Finkel’s lab knocked a mouse gene down to a quarter of its normal activity. The result: mice that lived 20 percent longer. That’s the equivalent of a 75-year-old life span stretching to 90 years. In yeast, worms, flies, and mice, what inhibits mTOR lengthens life. Inhibiting mTOR blocks cellular proliferation (which effectively also blocks cancer growth), activates cell-cycle arrest, improves the growth of new mitochondria, and improves insulin sensitivity. Perhaps it’s not surprising that rapamycin, originally used as an antifungal, is also an immunosuppressant and a cancer suppressor. Drugs like it are studied and used for a wide variety of indications-its derivative sirolimus, for example, is used in drug-eluting coronary stents, as well as to prevent rejection of transplanted kidneys. The mTOR protein is part of a piece of cellular machinery called the AMPK pathway, whose job is to sense low energy levels in the cell. The pathway appears to protect cells from aging, perhaps because mTOR inhibition is one of its effects. Fasting activates this pathway, as does exercise, which evidence suggests keeps us young. There’s a familiar drug that acts on AMPK: metformin, an old standby for treating type 2 diabetes. Researchers have noticed that people who take metformin have lower rates of cancer and longer life spans-results that can’t be accounted for by metformin’s effect on blood sugar. It turns out the drug gears down mTOR via an upstream effect on AMPK. Pitt leaders are planning an internally funded human trial of metformin in post-op and critical care patients. Senescent cells are those that have stopped replicating. As with damaged mitochondria, as they accumulate, they become a toxic, inflammatory nuisance to their neighbors. Gurkar has worked on this problem, too. In 2015, she was part of a group that demonstrated health span got longer in mice after treatment with senolytics. One drug they tried was quercetin, a plant pigment found in olive oil and blackberries and suspected of having a number of healthful effects in humans, including lowering blood pressure and potentially reducing cancer risk. (Olive oil could be one reason the Greek island of Ikaria is home to so many nonagenarians. “It’s a thing that all of us have and will get-aging. It’s probably the most fundamental thing,” says Finkel. “There is an association of free radical damage,” Finkel says, “but it’s not clear that that’s causative. There is this idea of sterile inflammation [i.e., inflammation without bacteria, as happens in gout or atherosclerosis] that occurs in elderly people; but again it’s not clear if that’s cause or consequences. Is there DNA damage as we age? Yes. Is it driving aging, or is it accompanying aging? If you block DNA damage, would you block aging? Or would you just block one aspect of aging? People really don’t know. “They certainly have all been linked to aging. They’re certainly all in play. Certainly you can get something that looks like aging by perturbing all of those things,” Finkel says. “But the question is, What really is the most important? “Twenty-five years ago, nothing was really known about the basic mechanisms. Now, quite a bit is known. There are still a lot of gaps, but I think there are rational targets out there that make sense. Pitt [is] very good at clinical translation, and I think that is where the field is moving,” he adds. “It’s going to be a great place to figure out, Can we really slow the rate of human aging? “Oh, yeah,” Finkel, age 59, replies.
Personal Life
Johanna is living her golden age as a widow. Quaas was married to Gerhard Quaas between 1963 and 2016 when he passed on. The adorable couple have three full-grown children from their five-decade marriage. Johanna has a second great-grandchild, a great-granddaughter, and four grandchildren.