Two exciting new benefits found for exercise in new research….

Today's Post:  Friday, 11-15-2013

This is one of our shorter posts but both of these are MAJOR and exciting benefits.

1.  We already know that exercise, particularly regular vigorous exercise, tends to increase the health and vitality of the mitochondria that are the energy creating centers for all cells. 

This slows aging and lowers or eliminates insulin resistance.  It also helps people maintain a positive state of mind and a feeling they have energy reserves when they need them.  It strongly protects the heart and tends to prevent or even help stop heart failure from getting worse.

And, we know that exercise changes the genes expressed in muscle tissue enough that they revert to a more youthful state.

Both of these certainly suggest that exercise might enable people to maintain their ability to move quickly far more than people who don’t exercise.

And, this is supported by the fact that people who exercise can maintain or even improve their strength even into their late 90’s as research has now confirmed.

Now new research has confirmed that exercise does have the ability to prevent the much slower motions of people into advanced age.  The things we already know suggested that might be the case.  But direct evidence of it too is new.

I once read an article about a woman who was literally one of the most knowledgeable people about a martial art who ever lived.  She was 98 years old.  She could watch younger people do the moves who were black belts and give them the precise advice they needed to become even higher level black belts and have it be accurate and doable.  And she still was doing so.

But she could no longer move fast enough or well enough to do the moves herself.

And, of course it’s common to see people over 85 in walkers or wheel chairs or who can no longer live independently from lack of mobility.

We now know this is largely avoidable or even may be reversible to a degree.

THAT is new and important news.

2.  It’s confirmed that exercise delivers far more blood flow to the hippocampus that enables people to remember well and can even improve memory functions that were lowered before.

Exercise also delivers more blood flow to the white matter that connects each part of the brain to the rest with the same results.

Wow!  We already knew that exercise causes the release of the brain and nerve cell growth factor BDNF and as a result people who exercise do NOT lose their white matter and have their brains shrink as people who don’t exercise do.

It is beginning to look as if exercise done well and regularly may be close to the number one way to keep good brain function overall and memory in particular!