While everyone ages…
And everyone will one day pass from the Earth.
The quality of the days you actually live can be greatly improved depending on certain habits and behaviors you regularly engage in.
For instance, if you want to slow down the aging process, retain muscle mass, lose weight, keep active hormone levels up, improve cardiovascular health and much more…
Then you ought to exercise regularly.
Perhaps you know this already…
Well, if you do, then maybe you’d like to see yet another study that shows you why regular exercise is so incredibly beneficial for a long life.
A study released by the University of Birmingham and King’s College London took a direct comparison to habitual, life-long exercisers and compared them to relatively healthy people who did not exercise to see just how important exercise was for slowing down the aging process.
Those who exercise regularly for most of their life, and those who didn’t.
The main exercise group the researchers studied was made up of 125 individuals ages 55-79 who cycled frequently (they were technically amateur cyclists). The group was ⅓ women and ⅔ men. To qualify as a participant the subjects couldn’t smoke or drink excessively.
They were also required to hit certain athletic benchmarks. The men were required to complete a 62-mile bike ride in 6.5 hours whereas the women had to complete a 37-mile bike ride in 5.5 hours.
The group they were compared to consisted of healthy people who didn’t exercise and who didn’t smoke or drink excessively either.
This group was made up of 75 subjects whose ages ranged 57 to 80 and then a smaller subset of 55 individuals aged 20 to 36.
Once the study participant met these criteria they were given a variety of tests.
As Dr. Wiggy Saunders notes in his recap of the study:
One of the most astounding results the researchers picked up on was how the cyclists did not lose muscle mass or strength as they aged. As Harvard University makes note, most men and women begin to lose muscle mass starting in their early 40s. So it’s pretty significant to see that older people who exercised weren’t losing muscle.
Equally substantial was how the group of cyclists didn’t have an increase in body fat and many markers for cardiovascular health stayed level and within the healthy range.
For the men, their Free-T levels (blood levels of the sex-hormone testosterone) were generally quite high.
And as a recap of the article stated, there was one particularly noticeable anti-aging benefit associated with regular exercise.
“More surprisingly, the study also revealed that the benefits of exercise extend beyond muscle as the cyclists also had an immune system that did not seem to have aged either.
An organ called the thymus, which makes immune cells called T cells, starts to shrink from the age of 20 and makes less T cells. In this study, however, the cyclists’ thymuses were making as many T cells as those of a young person.”
This study shows just how important it is to exercise.
What it doesn’t illustrate is what level of fitness a person needs to maintain.
The general consensus on the matter is as long as you get your heart rate up 3-4x a week for at least 30 minutes a session you’re doing more than is necessary to reap the benefits.
Here are a few videos you can use to get started
