Longevity files: A strong grip? Push-ups? Here’s what actually can help you live to a ripe old age.

So you want to live to a healthy old age. But how?

You could start doing pushups. A study published in February found that men who can hammer out 40 push-ups in one session had a lower risk of heart attacks and cardiovascular disease compared with guys who could do only 10 or fewer.

Or you could practice going from sitting on the floor to standing. Another study concluded that how easily people over 50 can do that is a good predictor of how long they might live.

Perhaps you want to work on your grip strength. That’s another measure that tracks longevity in middle-aged folks.

And if none of those appeal, you could always try improving your walking speed, which researchers have used to predict mortality rates in older adults.

The problem with any of these approaches is that you would just be training for a particular test, which misses the point. It’s not the push-up itself that makes you live longer; it’s that you are still strong and nimble enough to execute one.

What these tests have in common is they’re good shorthand of things that matter for longevity: overall health, fitness and muscle strength. A fit person walks faster than someone out of shape, and getting up off the floor is tricky for people with weak bones and muscles.

“Frailty is a really bad thing starting in middle age, and even worse as you get older,” says Michael Joyner, a physician and human physiology researcher at the Mayo Clinic.

One way to think of longevity is “not as some magic property of a body, but as the lucky state of not having a fatal disease,” says Steve Cole, professor of medicine and psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at the UCLA School of Medicine. “By and large, people don’t die of being old; they die of disease.” Therefore, the study of longevity is a way of looking at disease risk or the rate of disease development, he says.

Over the years, various drugs and nutritional supplements have been studied for their potential to help us live longer, but nothing has been shown to work in humans to the extent that would be required for the Food and Drug Administration’s approval, says Gordon Lithgow, chief academic officer at the California-based Buck Institute for Research on Aging.

While researchers continue searching for a pill to extend life, you’ll have to try these verified methods.

Exercise is key

The most powerful way to promote longevity and improve your long-term health is also simple and, depending on how you do it, free.

“There’s no question that exercise is the biggest anti-aging medicine there’s ever going to be – it’s really huge,” Lithgow says.

“Hands down, nothing compares to exercise,” says Laura L. Carstensen, founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity. “The great thing is that most people can do it, and you don’t need 10,000 steps per day to get the benefits.” It takes remarkably little exercise to get longevity benefits.

Even 10 to 15 minutes per day provides measurable rewards, says Michael Joyner, a physician and human physiology researcher at the Mayo Clinic. Going from sedentary to even just a bit of exercise is where you get the biggest payoffs. The health benefits – such as reducing your risk of heart disease and diabetes – increase with greater amounts of exercise, until you get to about an hour of exercise per day. After that, the rewards start to level off.

“Almost anyone doing more than that is doing it for things other than health,” Joyner says.

Go ahead and train for that Ironman if that’s what you want, but if you’re exercising for health and longevity, you don’t need to run a marathon. Work by Iowa State University epidemiologist Duck-Chul Lee suggests that even running a little less than 10 minutes per day could decrease your mortality risk by about 30%.

But you don’t have to run. Walking or other moderate activities are just as good if you’re looking for a longevity boost.

Some of the early evidence for the heart benefits of moderate exercise came from studies in the 1950s by British epidemiologist Jeremy N. Morris showing that conductors on double-decker buses, who spent their shifts walking up and down, had lower rates of coronary heart disease and thus lived longer than bus drivers who spent their workday sitting. Since then, studies showing the cardiovascular benefits of exercise have been “incredibly consistent, Joyner says.

But there’s more. Physical activity also reduces the risk of diabetes, which one study found shaved six years off life expectancy.

And it keeps your brain healthy, too. “Exercise has better effects on cognitive performance than sitting around playing brain games,” Carstensen says. A 2006 study in Neuroscience found that exercise spurs the brain to release growth factors that promote new connections between neurons, keeping the brain healthy. There’s even research suggesting that strength training can reverse some age-related changes in your muscles.

There seems to be something about keeping an active lifestyle, too.

When you look at centenarians as a group, they might not be Arnold Schwarzeneggers, but they typically maintain a high level of physical function, says author Bill Gifford, who interviewed quite a few of them while writing his book, “Spring Chicken: Stay Young Forever (Or Die Trying).” “They can go up and down stairs, probably because they never stopped going up and down stairs,” Gifford says.

His research for the book spurred him to make sure he was exercising at least a little bit every day.

Get enough sleep

Extend your life span while you sleep. It sounds like a bad infomercial, but it turns out that sleeping well is a good way to keep your body healthy for the long haul. Sleep is a time when your brain gets caught up on maintenance. In 2013, a team led by Maiken Nedergaard at the University of Rochester Medical Center published a study in Science concluding that sleep helps the brain clear out metabolic waste that accumulated during waking hours, providing a kind of restorative maintenance.

Skimp on sleep, and you hinder this important work.

If you’ve ever missed a night of slumber, you know that sleep deprivation hampers your mood and makes it hard to think clearly, but it can have severe consequences for your metabolic health, as well. Take someone who needs seven hours of sleep per night and restrict them to only five hours of shut-eye for five nights and they experience metabolic changes that look a lot like diabetes, says Satchidananda Panda, who studies circadian biology at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.

Indeed, numerous studies have shown that sleep deprivation can decrease insulin sensitivity – a measure of how well your body regulates blood sugar – and increase your risk of diabetes. A 2015 meta-analysis found that Type 2 diabetes risk was higher in people who sleep less than seven hours or more than nine hours, compared with people who got seven to eight hours per night.