Aptitude physique versus adiposité: Impacts cardio- métaboliques respectifs chez l'enfant/adolescent et chez la personne âgée

Middle-aged adult individuals with overweight or obesity are characterized by excessive adiposity, generally combined with poor cardiorespiratory fitness. Endurance exercise training improves cardiometabolic risk profile in such age range. Lack of physical activity among adolescents leads to increased fat mass and development of metabolic abnormalities whereas sedentarity in elderly people may lead to excessive adiposity contrasting with decreased muscular mass (sarcopenic obesity). In both young and elderly people, deleterious cardiometabolic effects of excessive fat mass ("fatness") might be counterbalanced by regular physical activity leading to better cardiorespiratory fitness ("fitness"). The present article analyzes the relationships between "fitness" and "fatness", and the respective cardiometabolic consequences of these two components, in the young population (< 20 years), on the one hand, and in the elderly population (> 60 years), on the other hand.