The Exercise is Medicine® Active Aging Initiative: Aligning Healthcare, Exercise Professionals and Community Resources to Support Healthy Aging

The global demographic shift toward an aging population underscores the urgent need for strategies that promote functional longevity and reduce age-related disease. Physical activity (PA) confers well-established benefits across cardiovascular, metabolic, musculoskeletal, cognitive, and psychosocial domains in older adults. However, PA participation remains suboptimal owing to social, environmental, and policy barriers. The Exercise is Medicine ^® Active Aging initiative seeks to address PA promotion through its integration into clinical care, connecting older adult patients to community-based PA programming. Developed by a multidisciplinary team of experts, the Exercise is Medicine ^® Active Aging initiative consists of three priority goals, underpinned by three cross-cutting themes, with the aim of increasing older adult engagement in PA through a community-based extension of healthcare. This article supports embedding PA into aging care models to foster a sustainable culture of active aging by synthesizing current evidence, discussing implementation barriers, and identifying future research priorities.