How exercise slows aging....

Today's Post: Friday, 1-6-2012

It does so in several ways in fact.

But the newest information is exciting since it suggests beginning to exercise and continuing may partially reverse aging in people who were not exercising before.

Let’s start there. New research found that as you age your body begins to stop making new stem cells. So damage to different parts of your body begins to build up and get worse because your body can no longer replace damaged cells as well as you’d need to get better. It no longer has the stem cells needed.

Then they tried injecting healthy muscle stem cells into older animals. Much of their age related disability reversed and the animals began to seem and act younger.

But here’s the key fact. Separate research found that exercised muscles even in older people tended to stay as youthful and strong and quick moving as the muscles of much younger people. How did that happen? When you exercise a muscle hard enough through strength training, interval cardio, other vigorous exercise, or hard physical work it triggers a rebuilding process. How does your body do that? It releases extra growth hormones including one called BDNF that grows new nerves and brain cells. But the research shows this rebuilding in older people even into their eighties and nineties and older continues to work well.

I don’t know that this has been tested. But this suggests strongly to me that it also creates and uses new muscle stem cells.

Meanwhile this does not happen in people who don’t get such exercise every week.

Their brains shrink. Their mobility decreases. And, their immune systems become impaired.

So they think less well and remember less well. Their lives become limited and their ability to be self reliant or helpful to the people around them becomes less. They are more likely to get and die of bacterial or viral diseases. AND, their immune systems stop being as able to kill off cancer cells.

Note that it is possible to overdo exercise at any age enough that it lowers your immune system instead of boosting it.

But to do that takes a LOT of effort. And in people who eat enough protein and eat foods that contain antioxidants and take antioxidant supplements, it takes far more exercise to do this.

In addition vigorous exercise of this kind boosts your blood circulation all over your body. And each part of you works better with adequate blood flow.

Bottom line is that such regular and vigorous exercise that we already knew helps prevent heart disease and brain shrinkage and keep your muscles strong enough to keep you mobile does quite a few other things too!

It helps your body prevent bacterial and viral diseases AND most cancers. And it helps your body’s immune system to turn off these diseases if you once get them!

Does that mean people who want to avoid cancer as they get older should do this kind of exercise? It certainly looks that way.

Does that mean people who got cancer as they got older should do this kind of exercise to help reverse it and prevent it from coming back? It certainly looks that way.

Such exercise is also a good physical stress reliever due to the extra relaxation and better sleep that follow the exercise as your body does this recovery process.

But that, hold the presses, DIRECTLY reverses aging!

Effective physical stress relief both lengthens your telomeres to some degree and prevents them from getting shorter.

Telomeres are the shoe lace cap like ends on your strands of DNA. When they stay long your cells make perfect copies of your DNA. But when your telomeres get too short, your body makes inaccurate copies or none at all.

There are other basic causes of aging and damage to your body. But this process is the aging process itself.

So, you might well ask, if this is so effective haven’t any direct tests found this result?

Yes! In fact, when they looked for it, it was easy to find!

At Stanford University back nearly 50 years ago in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s when the stress relieving and life enhancing effects of running were publicized a group of Stanford people who were a bit older began to run regularly for exercise. Some of this group were medical people and some of them were interested in disease prevention. They began to notice they were getting fewer diseases of aging and living longer than the people at Stanford who were not getting that kind of regular exercise.

So later on, some of them carefully gathered the data for a study. Running in older people tends to produce too many overuse injuries to continue. So their group of exercisers contained people who were still running and people who were still getting that much regular exercise in other ways.

The results were spectacular. The exercisers lived from 10 to over 25 years longer than the sedentary people. They got fewer things like heart disease and strokes and cancers. And if they got those things, they got them at older ages.

But that may UNDERstate this effect! The people who weren’t exercising were also from the Stanford community. They had stable and decently paying jobs that tended to be safe to do and access to decent medical care.

Are you doing regular and vigorous exercise now if only in short sessions?

If not, here are some questions to consider.

Do you want to age more slowly? Do you want to get fewer things like heart disease and cancers? Do you want to survive and recover if you get heart disease or some kind of cancer?

If yes, consider starting some regular exercise this week and keep doing it and improving it.

In the third part of our post, Solutions to common fat loss problems, just a few weeks ago on Tuesday, 12-20-2011 we included some ideas on how to find time to exercise.

Things like dumbbells and jump ropes can help.

But note that many of these exercises require no equipment at all beyond a rug or yoga mat or towel to do the exercises that you do on the floor.

You can do push ups. You can do pushups from the knees which require less initial strength. You can march in place lifting your knees a bit extra on each step. You can do abdominal crunches. You can do “lunges” where you step out with one foot far enough to have your front knee wind up at a right angle and step back and do it on the other side. You can do half squats or full squats. And there are literally hundreds more that you can learn from a Jazzercise or aerobics class or instructor.

The 6 keys to success are,

Schedule a definite time at several times each week to do these exercises even if it’s only a 3 to 6 minute session some days. Morning sessions first thing in the morning tend to be best and most reliable.

Start with fewer repetitions or times you repeat the movement for each excise than you can do. You can literally start with doing one or two or three repetitions the first time and succeed! You want it to feel easy and doable and refreshing NOT hard and overwhelming!

Rest briefly if you get too tired or out of breath AND do it soon after you notice it. You can build up to more later. But it’s both safer AND more effective to exercise vigorously and stop to rest than just continuing when you get tired. You just do it again when you recover.

Keep doing a bit more repetitions or do them a bit faster. Consider adding other exercises or trying them once you establish the habit of exercising. Making it progressive in this way allows you to end up highly capable even if you start at a very low level.

But be very careful to only do a bit more each week. If you add too much you can burn out or injure yourself. But if you add just a bit each week by just continuing to exercise each week you can make huge progress. For example, if you do marching in place and start with just doing it two steps worth, if you add just 2 steps a week in a year you will likely do 100.

Once you establish this think of yourself as an exerciser and a member of the health elite and remember the benefits! It’s a good feeling!