Slow aging with exercise & more....

Today's Post, Tuesday, 6-2-2009

Yesterday’s post on fat loss had this on the best kind of exercise to help you lose fat.:

“2. The most effective kinds of exercise to lose bodyfat, lose internal fat, and turn off insulin resistance have a key similarity. They may not last huge amounts of time. But they are vigorous and can be safe once you build up to it gradually and keep the high intensity per time brief.

What exercises do that?

Interval cardio, progressive strength training, playing competitive sports, jumping rope, using a mini-trampoline, quite brisk execution of martial arts moves or routines such as Tae Bo or Karate or Kung Fu all work.

And, many of these are in fact on record as being effective at losing fat and belly fat.”

Now, here’s the surprise. These kinds of exercise also help dramatically slow aging.

These exercises cause your body to release growth hormone. That triggers repairs all throughout your body. And that works best for creating these repairs, muscle growth and fat loss when you also eat enough protein.

Meanwhile, guess what happens to people who don’t do these kinds of exercises every week? The repairs don’t happen or happen as much and those people begin to age faster due to undone maintenance repairs that gradually build up.

Then there’s the new brain cells and nerves that kind of exercise causes you to grow. That keeps you mentally sharp and mentally younger. In addition, this means that you maintain better control over your muscles and maintain your muscle speed better. Athletes talk about “losing a step” as they get older. But if you do these kinds of exercises, that happens much, much less.

And this also creates increased longevity. A recent study of runners found that they outlived non-exercisers by as much as 15 or 20 years.

In addition, today I read that exercise virtually halts or reverses one part of aging in today’s email issue of TotalHealthBreakthroughs.

Here’s the actual article so you can see for yourself.:

"This article appears courtesy of Early to Rise's Total Health Breakthroughs, offering alternative solutions for mind, body and soul. For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.totalhealthbreakthroughs.com ."


"The Fountain of Youth? Hit the Weight Room!

By Missy Hawthorne, RN, CSCS

Are you a proud member of the “baby boom” generation? Well if so, congratulations! You and 78.2 million of your closest friends make up the bulk of this country's population, and the oldest of you turned 60 just a few short years ago! Turning 50, 60 or 70 for that matter is a wonderful milestone for which you should be proud. But as proud as you may be, aging brings some physical changes we may not be quite ready for, or ready to accept.

Have you noticed fine lines around the eyes, or your pants fitting a little tighter? Do your joints ache as you climb stairs, or do you find yourself bracing your back as you stoop to pick up the morning paper? And where did your strength go? Have your muscles vanished?

These realities and many more begin to haunt us at about age 40 and can continue to worsen with aging. Is there any way to slow things down? Ah, the fountain of youth! If only we could simply take a drink!

Studies and surveys I have come across of baby boomers' attitudes indicate that most of them are trying to be very proactive and slow their physical aging process as much as possible. One of the areas in which that's really important is muscle preservation.

As we age, we lose muscle mass and muscular strength leading to impairment in some activities of daily living. This natural age-related loss of muscle mass, strength and muscle function is called sarcopenia. The level of sarcopenia will greatly affect a person's ability to live and function independently as they grow older.

Research suggests the causes of sarcopenia are related not just to inactivity, but to oxidative stress (a condition in which antioxidant levels are lower than normal), inflammation, alterations in protein turnover, and dysfunction of mitochondria (the ATP energy factory in cells).1 And believe it or not, resistance training has been shown to not only reduce some of that oxidative stress, it reverses aging of the muscles on a genetic level.

One study compared 25 active older subjects (average age 68) to 26 younger subjects (average age 24). After a thorough medical evaluation including a graded exercise test, all subjects performed a supervised resistance training program on two non-consecutive days per week for 26 weeks.

All major muscle groups were included in the workout, beginning with single-set training which started out at more moderate levels and worked up to more intense levels. At the end of 26 weeks, the subjects underwent a muscle biopsy and RNA was extracted for analysis.

The biopsies revealed that resistance training not only slowed the process of aging, but actually reversed aging in something called the transcription RNA profile of the genes. The transcription profile looked like the RNA of a much younger person after the six months of resistance training, and the mitochondrial function of the cells was much improved. These changes translated into improved muscle strength. In fact, muscular strength in the older subjects improved by 50% in 26 weeks.2

For years personal trainers and fitness professionals have touted the benefits of resistance training. Now trainers can share with their clients that it may not be as easy as sipping from a fountain, but there is one sure way to reverse the aging process-- get into the weight room!

References

1. Kravitz, Len .2009. IDEA Fitness Journal. 21-23.
2. Melov, S. 2007. Resistance Exercise Reverses Aging In Human Skeletal Muscle. Plos ONE, 2 journal.pone.com .

[Ed. Note: Melissa Hawthorne, RN, BSN, CSCS is the owner of Priority Fitness Personal Training and Wellness. She is a Master Trainer for the Resist-a-ball Company, ISCA Personal Training, Kick-boxing, and Beamfit. Melissa serves as a fitness consultant for the LaValle Metabolic Institute. ....]"

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You can also help your body with antioxidants from supplements and food.

Fruit and vegetables – particularly organic and brightly colored ones such as sweet potatoes dark green, nonstarchy vegetables, and berries -- and vitamins A, C, E, the mineral selenium, and the supplement alpha lipoic acid all give you additional antioxidant protection. So does coffee, tea, cocoa, dark chocolate, and plant based spices such as basil and many other spices.
I’ve also read that vitamin C helps prevent aging directly by keeping your “telomeres” from unraveling & it helps prevent high inflammation and the diseases that causes, about which see our next post this Thursday.

In addition, you can improve the function of your mitochondria by taking CoQ10 100 mg twice a day in addition to the improvement you get from exercising.

And, though it may work best for your heart according to studies I’ve read of instead of all of you as once thought, you can also slow aging by taking resveratrol.