Many people believe they are aging well because they don’t feel pain or because they can still carry out their daily activities. However, the true state of aging is not revealed in a medical appointment or a lab test, but in everyday gestures: getting up from a chair, walking with confidence, or bending down without thinking.

The difference between those who maintain their independence into advanced ages and those who begin to lose it much earlier is not luck or genetics alone. It lies in a small set of physical and neurological abilities that, when preserved, show that the body still responds, adapts, and protects itself.

What’s most concerning is that these abilities are usually lost slowly. The body adapts to the decline, and the person is not always aware of what they can no longer do as before. As a result, deterioration is often detected only after it has progressed too far.

The 5 abilities that indicate whether you’re aging better than most people