It’s never too late to offset aging

Aging affects the body all the way down to the cellular level. Cells in older muscles, in particular, become weaker and don’t regenerate as easily. However, one study suggests that certain kinds of workouts can “correct” some damage caused by aging.

Researchers at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., conducted an experiment on subjects age 30 or younger or older than 64. As you’d guess, gains in muscle mass and strength were greater for those who did weight training, while gains in endurance were noted in those doing interval training on stationary bikes.
 
But biopsies of muscle cells taken after the training period turned up some unexpected results among the interval trainers. In younger subjects, activity levels changed in 274 genes. Among the older subjects, almost 400 genes were working differently.
 
Dr. Sreekumaran Nair, the study’s senior author, noted that intense exercise seemed to “correct” the decline in the cellular health of muscles associated with aging. The cells of older subjects responded more robustly to intense exercise than the cells of the young did. As Dr. Nair concluded: it’s never too late to benefit from exercise.
 
Click here to see full results of the study published in Cell Metabolism.
 
Thanks to our team member Art Bourgeois for discovering this story.