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Why reaction-time training should be part of your exercise routine as you get older

By CNN

(CNN) — When most people think about staying fit as they get older, they focus on the usual suspects: strength, mobility and cardio. But reaction time is a crucial cognitive and physical skill that rarely makes the list, despite its decline quietly affecting everything — including whether you catch yourself before a fall and how sharply your brain processes the world around you.

Reaction time is the interval between perceiving a stimulus — a curb, a misstep, an oncoming car — and initiating a physical response. It’s the speed of your nervous system’s decision loop, and as with muscle mass, it declines with age. This decline begins as early as your 20s and accelerates after 60, research has shown, with meaningful consequences for both physical safety and cognitive health.

As a mind-body coach who works with professional athletes across multiple sports, I’ve seen reaction-time training and tracking prioritized at the elite level for years. Yet for most nonathletes, developing the skill never reaches their fitness radar — even though it’s just as trainable as strength or cardio.

The good news is that reaction-time training is accessible to everyone, and the benefits extend far beyond sport: faster reflexes, more confident movement, better balance — and a brain that stays sharper longer.

The fall connection

When you trip, your nervous system has milliseconds to recruit the right muscles in the right sequence to prevent a fall. If that signal travels slowly or inconsistently, the window closes before your body can respond. As a result, slow reaction time is a significant contributing factor to falls, the leading cause of injury-related death among adults 65 and older, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But reaction time doesn’t just affect whether you fall. It affects how assuredly you move. People with slower reactions often begin limiting their activities — avoiding uneven terrain, skipping sports they love, scaling back daily movement — long before a fall ever happens. That self-imposed restriction accelerates the very physical decline they are trying to avoid.

The brain-body link

Here’s where the science gets especially compelling. Reaction time isn’t just a physical metric — it’s a window into central nervous system function. The speed at which your brain processes incoming information and sends a motor response reflects the efficiency of your mind-body connection.

CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta has noted that processing speed is among the cognitive abilities most vulnerable to age-related decline, and for some people that decline is steeper and can lead to dementia. The question researchers have been asking is whether training that speed can change the trajectory.

A landmark study funded by the National Institutes of Health suggests training can make a difference. The ACTIVE trial followed more than 2,800 older adults over 20 years, testing three types of cognitive training — speed of processing, memory and reasoning. The speed of processing training involved rapidly identifying visual targets on a screen with tasks increasing in difficulty as performance improved; of the three, it was the only intervention to show a statistically significant protective effect, with participants 25% less likely to develop dementia than those who received no training.

What reaction-time training can look like at home

Anyone can purchase the same reaction-based training technology, such as light board systems and app-based reflex trainers, used in professional sports. The advantages are structured programming and built-in progress tracking.

However, these tools require you to purchase equipment and a subscription, making them cost-prohibitive for some people.

You don’t need specialized equipment or a professional sports setting to work on reaction time. A partner can help keep training cues unpredictable, but you can also train solo.

4 simple drills for reaction-time training

Clock taps (solo): Number a dozen sticky notes one through 12 and arrange them on a wall in a clock formation. Then record yourself for 30 seconds to a minute on your phone calling out random numbers between one and 12, leaving a few seconds between each cue. Play it back and tap the corresponding number as quickly as possible. Repeat through five rounds, taking a short break in between each. Rerecord your cuing weekly to keep the sequence fresh.

Wall bounce (solo): Stand a few feet from a wall and throw a tennis ball against it at varying angles, catching it on the rebound without letting it hit the ground. The unpredictable bounce forces you to react accordingly. Do three rounds of one to two minutes each with short breaks in between. Step back gradually to increase the challenge as you progress.

Ball drops (partner): Stand an arm’s length from your partner. Have them hold a tennis ball at shoulder height and drop it without warning. Try to catch it before the second bounce. Take a small step back each time you succeed to progressively increase the challenge. Step forward again after a miss. Do three rounds of one to two minutes each with short breaks in between.

Lateral shuffling (partner): Set up two markers about 6 feet (nearly 2 meters) apart — or whatever distance feels most comfortable for your fitness level. Have a partner point left or right at random intervals while you shuffle quickly in that direction. The unpredictability is what drives the training effect. Do three rounds of one to two minutes each with short breaks in between.

Note: Because some of these drills are cardiovascular in nature, consult your doctor before beginning this or any new exercise program.

The key to all these activities is that your nervous system is forced to respond to the unpredictability of the cues rather than simply moving through a memorized sequence. That distinction matters. Predictable movement patterns, no matter how complex, don’t train the same neural pathways as genuine react-and-respond challenges.

Pick two drills and spend five to 10 minutes on them two to three times a week and track your progress by logging each session in your phone or a notebook with some simple self-reporting: How quickly did you cycle through the clock taps? How many times did you miss the ball on the bounce or drop? Did your shuffle feel faster or more controlled?

Over time, those notes will reveal more progress than you might expect. And the adaptations will start showing up as benefits in your daily life in the form of steadier footing, more confident movement and a sharper, more responsive brain.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.

The world’s oldest president left for a ‘brief stay’ in Europe. He hasn’t returned in two months

By CNN
(CNN) — When Paul Biya won his first presidential election in Cameroon in 1984, Nformi Bime was 23 and still a student.Bime is now 65 and retired from teaching. Biya is 93 – and still president. Last year, he won a disputed eighth term that could keep him in office until he is nearly 100.“The best is yet to come,” Biya said before the election, which his opponents called fraudulent and was marred by deadly clashes between protesters and police.For the past two months, however, the man who has ruled Cameroon since 1982, when as prime minister he assumed power following the resignation of the sitting president, has been thousands of miles away. He left on June 7 for what his office called a “brief private stay in Europe” — now his longest uninterrupted absence from the Central African nation in years.Last week, government spokesman René Emmanuel Sadi told French radio RFI that Biya was in Geneva, Switzerland and was not hospitalized, but did not give more detail on his whereabouts.A president who is rarely seenBiya is Cameroon’s second president since independence in 1960 and one of the world’s longest-serving leaders. He first won office in 1984 under a one-party system, then won six more elections after multiparty politics was introduced.He has spent extended periods abroad during his presidency. But his latest absence has revived questions about his health and who is running the country while he is away.Rumors about Biya’s health and whereabouts have long been part of public life in Cameroon, where he is rarely seen in public. His office has repeatedly had to push back against speculation that he was seriously ill or had died. In 2024, the government banned media discussions about his health, calling them a national security matter.Biya’s long rule also reflects a wider contrast across Africa. The continent has the world’s youngest population, but several countries are still led by aging leaders whose political careers began decades ago, including former liberation figures now governing in a different era.For millions of Cameroonians, Biya is the only president they have ever known.Bime’s children are among them. His oldest is 32, and his youngest is 18.Abit Riassai Acha, a 26-year-old doctoral student and community youth leader at the University of Yaoundé II, belongs to the same generation.“Growing up, President Biya was the only president I knew, so his presidency has been part of my entire experience of Cameroon,” said Acha, who voted for the first time in last year’s presidential election, backing the youthful opposition candidate Samuel Hiram Iyodi, 38.After more than four decades under the same president, questions about his leadership have only grown.“Because this has happened repeatedly over the years, many Cameroonians have become used to it,” Acha said of Biya’s long absences. “But becoming accustomed to something does not necessarily mean that people should stop asking questions about how the country is being governed.”Iyodi, who finished eighth in last year’s presidential election, which several candidates, including one of Biya’s main challengers, were barred from contesting, has called on parliament to ask Cameroon’s Constitutional Council to consider whether Biya’s absence amounts to a vacancy in the presidency. But such a move is unlikely to succeed, given the dominance of Biya’s ruling Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement.Despite being away, Biya has continued to make key decisions from abroad, including a major military reshuffle announced earlier this month. Yet questions about his prolonged stay overseas have left officials publicly assuring Cameroonians that their president is still alive.Government spokesman Sadi dismissed concerns about a power vacuum, telling RFI that “President Paul Biya is alive” and “will soon return.”From hope to frustrationBime is old enough to remember when Biya was the change. He first heard Biya’s name in the 1970s, when he served as secretary-general of the presidency under Cameroon’s first president after independence, Ahmadou Ahidjo. After Ahidjo resigned in 1982, Biya took over.When Biya first appeared on the ballot two years later, Bime saw him as a “representation of hope,” he said. “We believed he was young and dynamic – handsome too. He meant so much to Cameroonians.”Few imagined that the man they saw as a new beginning would remain in power for decades. For his critics, the disappointment is not just about how long Biya has stayed in office, but what they see as his failure to improve the lives of ordinary Cameroonians.Political analyst Collins Molua Ikome, a Cameroonian based in Germany, said he saw some of the country’s problems firsthand when he visited Cameroon in April.“Roads in Cameroon are extremely bad. I even witnessed a fatal accident,” he told CNN.Ikome also pointed to frequent power cuts, corruption and a lack of jobs for young people.Wilson Tamfuh, a public and international law professor at the University of Dschang in West Cameroon, said the country has institutions that can keep the government running when the president delegates responsibilities. Key duties, he said, can be handled by the prime minister, the secretary-general at the presidency and ministers.But the bigger question, Tamfuh said, is whether the government is solving the country’s longstanding problems.“People want the Anglophone crisis resolved, standards of living ameliorated, more good roads, fewer people on the streets with degrees, and more,” he told CNN, referring to the years-long separatist conflict in Cameroon’s English-speaking regions.Whenever Biya eventually leaves office, his successor will inherit a country also facing attacks by Boko Haram militants in the north and deep economic frustration among young people.Healthcare is another concern. Ikome said access to quality healthcare remains out of reach for many Cameroonians.“Life expectancy in the country is below 70 years. However, Biya has far outlived that due to access to medical healthcare abroad, which the ordinary Cameroonian cannot access due to poverty,” Ikome said.The divide is not unique to Cameroon. Across Africa, political elites have often sought healthcare or maintained homes abroad, even as public services at home struggle.For Bime, the question is more personal: Will he live to see another president?After decades of waiting for change, he worries he may not – and that Biya could outlive him and many others who are not part of the country’s elite.“Anytime they have a cold, they run overseas and are taken care of, but the other Cameroonians are dying because of lack of care,” he said.The-CNN-Wire™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
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