Older adults around age 72 who don’t fall tend to have stronger leg power—especially when standing up quickly from a chair—compared to those who do fall, suggesting that how fast you can move your legs might matter more than raw strength when predicting fall risk.

In older adults, how fast muscles can generate power matters more for staying steady on your feet and avoiding falls than how strong or big the muscles are — and it drops faster as you age.

Older people who start with less muscle in their legs, weaker legs, or are older in age tend to lose more leg strength over three years—even when you account for each factor on its own.

Older adults around age 72 who have fallen before aren't any weaker in their knee muscles than those who haven't fallen — so knee strength might not help predict who's more likely to fall.

As people get older, their legs get weaker much faster than they lose muscle mass — so something else besides just losing muscle must be making them weaker.

As people get older, their leg muscle power slowly gets weaker — and it starts to drop faster after age 60. A long-term study found that this loss speeds up with age and could be a sign of overall physical decline as we get older.