Mission / History

OUR MISSION To advocate lifelong wellness and bridge the gap between awareness and action by providing information and opportunities for health and fitness.

To teach people the benefits of physical activity and to provide opportunities for communities to be educated about and to participate in activities that contribute to wellness and to show that misuse and disuse of the body and mind are more the cause of disability than chronological age alone. We exist to spread the joys of fitness and wellness.

OUR HISTORY For many years, the Stanford University Medical Center has conducted research on health promotion and disease prevention. Several researchers were focused on the effects of exercise, particularly among older people, on health. One researcher, Dr. Peter Wood of the Stanford Center for Research in Disease Prevention (SCRDP) had recruited a group of regular runners to serve as subjects in his experiments. In one "classic" study, Wood, Haskell, Klein et al., established that regular running was "associated with significant increases in high density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL) levels (‘good cholesterol’)."1

Inspired by these results, Fifty-Plus Lifelong Fitness (renamed Lifelong Fitness Alliance) was formed in 1979 by a group of the participants in the Stanford research in order to help provide subjects for continued research at Stanford and to encourage older adults to run regularly. Dr. Peter Wood was one of the founders of the group and was elected to be its first president. The Lifelong Fitness Alliance grew steadily over the next twenty years, mostly by word of mouth as well as articles about the organization that appeared in running magazines and other publications. A group of Lifelong Fitness Alliance members have participated in a series of unique longitudinal studies of the effects of exercise over the past 15 years. Several dozen research papers based on studies of the organization’s membership have been published to date. A summary of these studies states that:

When contrasted with inactive community control groups, the Lifelong Fitness Alliance cohort has been shown to display markedly better health profiles, including several-fold advantages in mortality and disability adjusted for age, sex, body mass, educational level, smoking history, alcohol intake, blood pressure, and other co-morbid conditions.2

In 1990, the Lifelong Fitness Alliance’s board of directors voted to expand the focus of the organization from just promoting running to promoting all aspects of fitness. This broadened the appeal of the organization and helped to grow its membership.

Lifelong Fitness Alliance (formerly Fifty-Plus Lifelong Fitness) is a twenty-eight year old nonprofit organization whose mission is... to advocate lifelong wellness and bridge the gap between awareness and action by providing information and opportunities for health and fitness.

The organization that started at Stanford University as an outgrowth of medical research on the value of exercise for older persons now has approximately 1,000 members across the United States. Lifelong Fitness Alliance publishes a newsletter and provides education and opportunities for wellness and fitness activities for adults.