The research
Three sections, three different strengths of evidence. They are not equal, and this page says so rather than letting the strongest one cover for the weakest.
Movement
Strength work, three times a week
Muscle and strength fall away with age, and the loss speeds up after about 60. Resistance exercise reverses part of it at any age — trials have shown strength gains in people in their eighties and nineties who had never lifted anything before.
Three sessions a week is not a round number picked for tidiness. It is the dose used in the Otago Exercise Programme, the home strength and balance programme this site is modelled on. Muscle is built in the gap between sessions, not during them, which is why the days in between are for walking rather than more of the same.
What it will not do: walking on its own does not prevent falls, and no amount of strength work replaces the balance section below.
Balance
The part with the real evidence
This is the strongest claim on the site, and it is the only one worth making loudly. Exercise programmes built around balance and strength reduce the rate of falls in older people living at home by roughly a quarter to a third. That finding rests on dozens of randomised trials and tens of thousands of participants — it is about as settled as anything in this field gets.
It is why balance gets its own section every single day, including walking days, and why it is only ever one movement. One thing done daily beats five things done when you can face them.
The effect comes from being challenged. A balance exercise that feels completely secure is not training anything — which is exactly why every one of them insists on something solid within arm's reach. The point is to work at the edge of steady while being unable to fall.
What it will not do: reducing the rate of falls is not the same as preventing every fall, and no programme claims it is.
Mind
Here for enjoyment, and we will not pretend otherwise
Brain-training claims are the least honest corner of this whole industry. In 2016 the makers of Lumosity settled with the US Federal Trade Commission over advertising that claimed their games improved everyday memory and performance. The finding that keeps turning up in the research is narrower and duller: practise a task and you get better at that task, and it does not reliably carry over to anything else.
So the puzzles here are not sold as medicine. They are here because they are enjoyable, and because a daily habit with three different things in it is easier to keep than a habit with one. Turning up is the mechanism. The sudoku is the reason to turn up.
The written prompts — list your teachers, then write about one — come from a different tradition. Structured reminiscence work has been studied mainly for mood and wellbeing rather than for memory, and that is the only claim made for it here. Mostly it is just a good thing to spend ten minutes doing.
What it will not do: make you sharper, slow down dementia, or improve your memory. Anyone who tells you their puzzles do that is going further than the evidence allows.
Sources
Where this comes from
- Sherrington C, et al. Exercise for preventing falls in older people living in the community. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 2019.
- Campbell AJ, Robertson MC. Otago Exercise Programme to prevent falls in older adults. Home-based strength and balance retraining, three times weekly.
- Clemson L, et al. Integration of balance and strength training into daily life activity (LiFE): randomised parallel trial. BMJ, 2012.
- Federal Trade Commission. Lumosity to pay $2 million to settle FTC deceptive advertising charges. January 2016.
- Simons DJ, et al. Do "brain-training" programs work? Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 2016.
Summaries, not quotations. Figures are stated as ranges because that is how the reviews state them. This is general fitness information and not medical advice.