WHY EXERCISE KEEPS US YOUNG
Active older people resemble much younger people physiologically, according to a new study of the effects of exercise on aging. The findings suggest that many of our expectations about the inevitability of physical decline with advancing years may be incorrect and that how we age is, to a large degree, up to us.
Aging remains a surprisingly mysterious process. A wealth of past scientific research has shown that many bodily and cellular processes change in undesirable ways as we grow older. But science has not been able to establish definitively whether such changes result primarily from the passage of time — in which case they are inevitable for anyone with birthdays — or result at least in part from lifestyle, meaning that they are mutable.
This conundrum is particularly true in terms of inactivity. Older people tend to be quite sedentary nowadays, and being sedentary affects health, making it difficult to separate the effects of not moving from those of getting older.
In the new study, which was published this week in The Journal of Physiology, scientists at King’s College London and the University of Birmingham in England decided to use a different approach.
They removed inactivity as a factor in their study of aging by looking at the health of older people who move quite a bit.
“We wanted to understand what happens to the functioning of our bodies as we get older if we take the best-case scenario,” said Stephen Harridge, senior author of the study and director of the Centre of Human and Aerospace Physiological Sciences at King’s College London.
To accomplish that goal, the scientists recruited 85 men and 41 women aged between 55 and 79 who bicycle regularly. The volunteers were all serious recreational riders but not competitive athletes. The men had to be able to ride at least 62 miles in six and a half hours and the women 37 miles in five and a half hours, benchmarks typical of a high degree of fitness in older people.
The scientists then ran each volunteer through a large array of physical and cognitive tests. The scientists determined each cyclist’s endurance capacity, muscular mass and strength, pedaling power, metabolic health, balance, memory function, bone density and reflexes.
They also had the volunteers complete the so-called Timed Up and Go test, during which someone stands up from a chair without using his or her arms, briskly walks about 10 feet, turns, walks back and sits down again.
The researchers compared the results of cyclists in the study against each other and also against standard benchmarks of supposedly normal aging. If a particular test’s numbers were similar among the cyclists of all ages, the researchers considered, then that measure would seem to be more dependent on activity than on age.
As it turned out, the cyclists did not show their age. On almost all measures, their physical functioning remained fairly stable across the decades and was much closer to that of young adults than of people their age. As a group, even the oldest cyclists had younger people’s levels of balance, reflexes, metabolic health and memory ability.
And their Timed Up and Go results were exemplary. Many older people require at least 7 seconds to complete the task, with those requiring 9 or 10 seconds considered to be on the cusp of frailty, Dr. Harridge said. But even the oldest cyclists in this study averaged barely 5 seconds for the walk, which is “well within the norm reported for healthy young adults,” the study authors write.
Some aspects of aging did, however, prove to be ineluctable. The oldest cyclists had less muscular power and mass than those in their 50s and early 60s and considerably lower overall aerobic capacities. Age does seem to reduce our endurance and strength to some extent, Dr. Harridge said, even if we exercise.
But even so, both of those measures were higher among the oldest cyclists than would be considered average among people aged 70 or above. All in all, the numbers suggest that aging is simply different in the active.
“If you gave this dataset to a clinician and asked him to predict the age” of one of the cyclists based on his or her test results, Dr. Harridge said, “it would be impossible.” On paper, they all look young.
Of course, this study is based on a single snapshot of an unusual group of older adults, Dr. Harridge said. He and his colleagues plan to retest their volunteers in five and 10 years, which will provide better information about the ongoing effects of exercise on aging.
But even in advance of those results, said Dr. Harridge, himself almost 50 and an avid cyclist, this study shows that “being physically active makes your body function on the inside more like a young person’s.”
What’s the best way to create a habit of exercising? I want to exercise regularly but its hard for me to do things daily.
You are not alone, especially now, when many of us make New Year’s resolutions to be more active, which we promptly break.
But there are ways to bolster your resolve, said Ryan Rhodes, a professor of behavioral medicine at the University of Victoria in British Columbia who studies exercise intention and compliance.
First, set a realistic goal, Dr. Rhodes said. “People who intend to exercise a lot, such as four or more times a week, are more likely not to meet those intentions,” he said, than people who aim lower.
Also, don’t undermine yourself at the outset. “Someone can plan to go to the gym Friday at 5:30 a.m. before work and do powerlifting,” he said. But if that person hates waking early, doesn’t enjoy the gym, and knows nothing about weight training, those intentions will evaporate.
Instead, consider all of the practical obstacles that stand between you and exercise, and address them, Dr. Rhodes said:
- Pack your gym bag the night before and set it by the door.
- Check public transportation schedules if you do not have a car.
- Plan workouts for when you are most awake and energetic, and consistently set aside that same time for exercise so that it becomes habitual.
- Finally, and most importantly, choose an activity that leaves you feeling happy and confident, he said.
Studies consistently show that people who dislike their workouts — a surprisingly large number — or feel clumsy and inept at them will not continue, he said, no matter how sincere their intentions. So if the treadmill bores you and CrossFit intimidates, try a spin class or water aerobics.
“We all desire the health outcomes from regular exercise,” Dr. Rhodes concluded, “but we also need to work on finding the most pleasant experiences to actually achieve that behavior.”
Do you get the same benefit of exercising for 30 minutes a day if that exercise is broken down into shorter segments — for instance, three 10-minute sessions?
According to the latest science, not only do multiple short sessions of exercise generally provide the same health and fitness benefits as a comparable amount of exercise completed in one uninterrupted workout, but by some measures, the briefer bouts are better.
For a study presented in May at the American College of Sports Medicine annual meeting, for instance, researchers at the Capital University of Physical Education and Sports in Beijing strapped small monitors to the ankles of a group of healthy men. The monitors measure changes in blood flow, providing an indirect measure of arterial stiffness. Less stiffness is healthier.
Then they had each man, on alternating days, ride a stationary bicycle or rest quietly for half an hour. Some rode for 30 minutes uninterrupted, while others rode for two sessions of 15 minutes each, with 20 minutes of rest between.
After the 30-minute session and the two 15-minute sessions, the men’s arteries were more pliable than when they rested. But the arterial benefits did not linger long after the 30-minute workout, dissipating within 40 minutes when final measurements were taken. Not so with the shorter sessions; after the second of those, the men’s arteries retained extra flexibility 40 minutes later.
Similarly, when researchers examined exercise and blood pressure control in a 2012 study, they found that one 30-minute afternoon walk improved blood pressure readings for 24 hours among adults with borderline hypertension. Three 10-minute walks spaced throughout the day improved overall blood pressure just as effectively, but unlike the single session, they also blunted subsequent spikes in pressure, which can indicate worsening blood pressure control.
In another study presented at the sports medicine meeting, Taiwanese researchers reported that eight weeks of treadmill jogging significantly improved college students’ endurance, and the improvements were almost identical, whether the volunteers jogged for 30 minutes or for three 10-minute sessions on the same day.Just how abbreviated, though, such repeated workouts can be and still remain efficacious isn’t yet clear. Are six five-minute walks as beneficial as a single half-hour stroll?
“We don’t know,” says Glenn Gaesser, a professor at Arizona State University, who led the blood-pressure study. But already, he continues, based on the available science, “we can tell people who think that 30 minutes of exercise is too much or takes up too much time, just do 10 minutes” three times a day — a goal that, for almost all of us, is achievable.
This Article Was Written By Gretchen Reynolds
January 7, 2015
Taken from www.well.blogs.nytimes.com/
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The "take homes" from this article are that, even if you don't like exercise, this shows you that ANY type of physical activity is going to pay huge dividends. So PLEASE don't look at doing something / anything physical as being this horrid "thing" that is beyond you. The Venus Factor is very gentle in the way it approaches the issue of a bit of physical activity to make it give you that extra bit of a new you. So don't think of "getting physical" as a thorn in your side when it comes to achieving your positive Venus Factor outcomes / results.
