Exercise Strategies for Improving Health Outcomes in Older Adults with Comorbidities: The Role of Vivifrail Tailored-Multicomponent Training

Healthy and even more so chronically ill older adults are candidates for physical exercise strategies that will lessen the burden of multimorbidity, disability, and premature death caused by incident disease. Individualized tailored-multicomponent exercise training, including the combination of resistance training, balance, gait training or both may be the cornerstone for reducing the incidence of falls in older adults with physical frailty. Besides being safe for both healthy and physiologically vulnerable, frail older adults, a properly designed exercise program is free of the potential unwanted side effects caused by common medications that are prescribed in patients with chronic multimorbidity. Dose–response relationships between changes in fitness and better health outcomes have been defined for some, but certainly not for all, diseases, and syndromes. Some modalities or doses of exercise that are promoted for older adults (mild calisthenics, slow-paced walking) have little or no discernible effects on physical fitness but is possible that yield benefits in other domains. The Vivifrail Project (an EU-funded Project as part of the Erasmus+ program) represents such a pilot program, consisting of the rapid screening for physical frailty and sarcopenia. The Vivifrail program provides training on how to promote and prescribe physical exercise in older adults to maintain a level of function that attains the highest degree of autonomy possible ( http://www.vivifrail.com ).