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Living Longer: Exercise

By Susan Crandell, September & October 2006

Regular physical activity has been shown to reduce your risk of heart attack, stroke, Alzheimer's, and some cancers. Now we're finding it also may add years to your life. That's powerful medicine indeed

There are no guarantees in life and even fewer in death. But if you wish to prolong the former and delay the latter, scientists can now pretty much promise that regular exercise will help. "So many of what we thought were symptoms of aging are actually symptoms of disuse," says Pamela Peeke, M.D., a University of Maryland researcher and author of Body for Life for Women (Rodale, 2005). "This is a monster statement." It means that your health is not just a throw of the genetic dice but a factor that is largely under your control. "Our bodies are built for obsolescence after 50," Peeke says. "Up to 50 you can get away with not exercising; after that, you start paying the price."

The most dramatic declines due to aging are in muscle strength. "Unless you do resistance exercise - strength training with weights or elastic bands - you lose six pounds of muscle a decade," says Wayne Westcott, Ph.D., the highly respected fitness research director at the South Shore YMCA in Quincy, Massachusetts. That change in body composition not only saps our strength; it also lowers our metabolism and exposes us to greater risk of age-related disease. In fact, the loss of muscle (and accompanying increase in body fat) puts extra strain on the heart, alters sugar metabolism (increasing the risk for diabetes), and can tip the balance of healthy lipids in the blood, leading to heart attack and stroke.

Building muscle is much easier than you might think. Strength training just 20 minutes a day, two or three times a week, for 10 to 12 weeks can rebuild three pounds of muscle and increase your metabolism by 7 percent. Do you really need a boost in metabolism? Yes, if you want to feel more energetic, more alert, more vital and alive. Plus, the added muscle has a halo effect on many systems of the body, reducing blood pressure, improving your ability to use glucose from the blood by 25 percent, increasing bone mass by 1 to 3 percent, and improving gastrointestinal efficiency by 55 percent. "It's like going from a four-cylinder engine to a six," Westcott says.

If that's not enough to get your attention, consider this: a regular exercise program (30 minutes of physical activity at least three days a week) can reduce your risk of dying in the next eight years by 40 percent, improve brain function, cut your risk of Alzheimer's disease by up to 60 percent, and blunt the symptoms of depression. This is powerful medicine, given that 80 percent of the population over 65 suffers from at least one chronic condition, and half have two or more, according to a report from the Census Bureau and the National Institute on Aging.

What is it about physical activity that makes it such a panacea? As scientists learn more about how the aging process works, they're finding that exercise-both aerobic exercise and strength training—has a tremendous impact on every cell in the body, reducing inflammation, increasing blood flow, and even reversing the natural declines in oxygen efficiency and muscle mass that come with aging.

The most dramatic declines due to aging are in muscle strength.

Westcott points to a study his organization conducted at a nursing home in Orange City, Florida. Nineteen men and women with an average age of 89, most of whom used wheelchairs, did just ten minutes of strength training a week. "After 14 weeks almost everybody was out of their wheelchairs," Westcott says. "One woman moved back into independent living." The results were published in Mature Fitness.

Another inspiring study, published last spring in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, reported that people in their 60s and 70s who walked or jogged, biked, and stretched for 90 minutes three times a week for six months increased their exercise efficiency-their ability to exercise harder without expending more energy-by a whopping 30 percent. But here's the shocker: a comparison group of people in their 20s and 30s showed an efficiency increase of just 2 percent. The results caught even study author Wayne C. Levy, M.D., an associate professor of cardiology at the University of Washington in Seattle, by surprise. "I hadn't anticipated that the older people would improve more than the group in their 20s and 30s," he says.

The explanation, Levy believes, may involve improvement in the function of the mitochondria-spherical or rod-shaped structures in our cells that take glucose, protein, and fat from the food we eat and turn them into energy. In fact, scientists believe that most of the dramatic benefits we get from exercise can be traced to this improvement in the mitochondria. "Mitochondrial function naturally declines with age," explains Kevin Short, Ph.D., who studies mitochondria and exercise at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. But exercise, he found, can reverse that decline.

When Short and his colleagues put 65 healthy nonexercisers ranging in age from 21 to 87 on a bicycle training program three days a week, they found that everyone's maximum aerobic capacity had increased by about 10 percent after four months. When they studied thigh-muscle samples, they found out why: the mitochondria were pumping out more adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the fuel muscles use to move.

Now, if mightier mitochondria aren't enough to get you on your exercise bike each morning, consider this: physical activity may also combat oxidative damage. Abraham Aviv, M.D., director of the Center of Human Development and Aging at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, explains how it works: "During exercise there's a tremendous burst of oxidative agents that are injurious to tissue." But while you take in more oxygen while exercising, regular physical activity also slows your resting heart rate, making it more efficient. The net result? Exercise reduces the overall rate at which you create harmful free radicals.

Finally, to all these substantial benefits of exercise add one more: Professor Tim Spector, director of the TwinsUK registry at St. Thomas' Hospital in London, is conducting experiments to determine whether exercise slows down the rate at which our telomeres shrink. (Telomeres are DNA sequences, located on the ends of chromosomes, that shorten as we age. Although the results have not yet been published, preliminary findings suggest that in exercising and sedentary twin pairs, the twin who exercises has much longer telomeres "even when you adjust for differences in weight and smoking," says Spector.

In short, the evidence is clear: daily physical activity can transform your life. And it's never too late to start. "I started strength-training my father when he was 82," recalls Westcott. "He's six feet tall, but he was emaciated by the stress of my mother's death and weighed only 124 pounds. In a year and a half, he added 24 pounds of muscle. At 97, he's stronger than people half his age."

Susan Crandell is the author of Thinking About Tomorrow: Reinventing Yourself at Midlife, to be published by Warner Books in January 2007.

New research reveals surprising facts about our changing bodies.

You Can Stop Normal Aging

By Dr. Henry S. Lodge

From your body's point of view, "normal" aging isn't normal at all. It's a choice you make by the way you live your life. The other choice is to tell your cells to grow—to build a strong, vibrant body and mind.

Let's have a look at standard American aging. Barbara D. had a baby when she was 34, gave up exercise and gained 50 pounds. Exhausted and depressed, Barbara thought youth; energy and optimism were all in her rearview mirror. Jon M., 55, had fallen even farther down the slippery slope. He was stuck in the corporate world of stress, long hours and doughnuts. At 255 pounds, he had knees that hurt and a back that ached. He developed high blood pressure and eventually diabetes. Life was looking grim.

Jon and Barbara weren't getting old; they had let their bodies decay. Most aging is just the dry rot we program into our cells by sedentary living, junk food and stress. Yes, we do have to get old, and ultimately we do have to die. But our bodies are designed to age slowly and remarkably well.

Most of what we see and fear is decay, and decay is only one choice. Growth is the other. After two years of misery, Barbara started exercising and is now in the best shape of her life. She just finished a sprint triathlon and, at 37, feels like she is 20. Jon started eating better and exercising too—slowly at first, but he stuck with it. He has since lost 50 pounds, the pain in his knees and back has disappeared, and his diabetes is gone. Today, Jon is 60 and living his life in the body of a healthy 30-year-old. He will die one day, but he is likely to live like a young man until he gets there.

The hard reality of our biology is that we are built to move. Exercise is the master signaling system that

tells our cells to grow instead of fade. When we exercise, that process of growth spreads throughout every cell in our bodies, making us functionally younger. Not a little bit younger—a lot younger. True biological aging is a surprisingly slow and graceful process. You can live out your life in a powerful, healthy body if you are willing to put in the work. Let's take a step back to see how exercise works at the cellular level. Your body is made up of trillions of cells that live mostly for a few weeks or months, die and are replaced by new cells in an endless cycle.

For example, your taste buds live only a few hours, white blood cells live 10 days, and your muscle cells live about three months. Even your bones dissolve and are replaced, over and over again. A few key stem cells in each organ and your brain cells are the only ones that stick around for the duration. All of your other cells are in a constant state of renewal.

You replace about 1% of your cells every day. That means 1% of your body is brand-new today, and you will get another 1% tomorrow. Think of it as getting a whole new body every three months. It's not entirely accurate, but it's pretty close. Viewed that way, you are walking around in a body that is brand-new since Christmas-new lungs, new liver, new muscles, new skin. Look down at your legs and realize that you are going to have new ones by the Fourth of July. Whether that body is functionally younger or older is a choice you make by how you live.

You choose whether those new cells come in stronger or weaker. You choose whether they grow or decay each day from then on. Your cells don't care which choice you make. They just follow the directions you send. Exercise, and your cells get stronger; sit down, and they decay.

This whole system evolved over billions of years out in nature, where all animals face two great cellular challenges: The first is to grow strong, fast, and fit in the spring, when food abounds and there are calories to fuel hungry muscles, bones and brains. The second is to decay as fast as possible in the winter, when calories disappear and surviving starvation is the key to life. You would think that food is the controlling signal for this but it's not. Motion controls your system.

Though we've moved indoors and left that life behind, our cells still think we're living out on the savannah, struggling to stay alive each day. There are no microwaves or supermarkets in nature. If you want to eat,

you have to hunt or forage every single day. That movement is a signal that it's time to grow. So, when you exercise, your muscles release specific substances that travel throughout your bloodstream, telling your cells to grow.

Sedentary muscles, on the other hand, let out a steady trickle of chemicals that whisper to every cell to decay, day after day after day.

Men like Jon, who go from sedentary to fit, cut their risk of dying from a heart attack by 75% over five years. Women cut their risk by 80%-and heart attacks are the largest single killer of women. Both men and women can double their leg strength with three months of exercise, and most of us can double it again in another three months. This is true whether you're in your 30s or your 90s. It's not a miracle or a mystery. It's your biology, and you're in charge.

The other master signal to our cells-equal and, in some respects, even more important than exercise-is emotion. One of the most fascinating revelations of the last decade is that emotions change our cells through the same molecular pathways as exercise. Anger, stress and loneliness are signals for "starvation" and chronic danger. They "melt" our bodies as surely as sedentary living. Optimism, love and community trigger the process of growth, building our bodies, hearts and minds.

Men who have a heart attack and come home to a family are four times less likely to die of a second heart attack. Women battling heart disease or cancer do better in direct proportion to the number of close friends and relatives they have. Babies in the ICU who are touched more often are more likely to survive. Everywhere you look, you see the role of emotion in our biology. Like exercise, it's a choice.

It's hard to exercise every day.

And with our busy lives, it's even harder to find the time and energy to maintain relationships and build communities. But it's worth it when you consider the alternative. Go for a walk or a run, and think about it. Deep in our cells, down at die level of molecular genetics, we are wired to exercise and to care. We're beginning to wake up to that as a nation, but you might not want to wait. You might want to join Barbara, Jon and millions of others and change your life. Start today. Your cells are listening.

Dr. Henry S. Lodge is on the faculty of Columbia Medical School and is co-author of "Younger Next Year" (Workman).

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