You’ve heard it before, and you’ll hear it again: Physical exercise is very important in combatting aging, both the physical aging of your body, as well as the mental aging of your mind.
In this post, we draw together links to four articles on a recent new study about the way that exercise combats physical aging, together with a link to the study abstract. The study was carried out at the Mayo clinic in Rochester, MN, and demonstrated that exercise — particularly high-intensity interval training (HIT) — has profound effects at the cellular level. It may even reverse some of the aging effects in muscle cells, as well as possibly other cells in the body.
The Mayo researchers utilized 36 men and 36 women, broken into two age groups: 18-30 years old and 65-80 years old. Each age group was split into three exercise groups: HIT biking together with treadmill walking, weight training, and mixed biking and weight training. Each group worked out 5 days a week for 12 weeks. Muscle change assessments were based on biopsies taken from the volunteers’ thigh muscles, compared with biopsies taken from a sedentary control group.
All of the exercise groups showed muscle improvement, particularly increases in muscle cell mitochondrial capacity, which is the energy source for all cells. Strikingly, the younger HIT group showed a 49% increase, while the older HIT group showed a dazzling 69% increase. The study also showed that exercise leads to improvement in protein-building ribosomes.
Senior study author, Sreekumbaran Nair said
“Based on everything we know, there’s no substitute for these exercise programs when it comes to delaying the aging process. These things we are seeing cannot be done by any medicine. . . . exercise is critically important to prevent or delay aging. There’s no substitute for that.”
And
“If exercise restores or prevents deterioration of mitochondria and ribosomes in muscle cells, there’s a good chance it does so in other tissues, too. Understanding the pathways that exercise uses to work its magic may make aging more targetable.”
The four articles on the study are:
This Workout Might Help Reverse the Aging Process, According to a New Study [2017]
Interval training exercise could be a fountain of youth [2017]
How exercise — interval training in particular — helps your mitochondria stave off old age [2017]
Mayo Clinic Study Identifies How Exercise Staves Off Old Age [2017]
The published study abstract is here:
Enhanced Protein Translation Underlies Improved Metabolic and Physical Adaptations to Different Exercise Training Modes in Young and Old Humans [2017]
All the links have been added to Aging.
