What kind of exercise suppress the process of ageing?

According to recent findings regarding how exercise affects our cells, researchers found that aerobic activities and interval training “can make our cells biologically younger.”

During their studies, the researchers highlighted the fact that even though exercise, in general, is beneficial to our body, their focus was on how certain types of training may modify our cells to prevent our body from ageing prematurely.

Plenty of evidence exists regarding the positive functions that exercise has on our body. One might also notice that people who are generally healthier and perform regular exercise, tend to look younger.

Past studies have shown that exercise alters the workings of many genes, as well as the immune system, muscle-repair mechanisms and many other systems within the body.

This statement emphasizes the fact that exercise affects our body as a whole and that every mechanism present is interdependent. If such modifications were to occur, every element of our body will be altered.

Researchers consider that generally, most anti-ageing effects of physical activity may occur within our chromosomes, specifically at telomeric regions. The function of telomeres is that of protecting our cells from DNA damage during cell replication. As cells age, they become shorter and fragile and as a result, are unable to safeguard our DNA. Medical professionals trust that “telomere length is a useful measure of a cell’s functional age.”

Studies have found that individuals who perform exercise regularly have longer telomeres than inactive individuals of the same age group. 

A new study is trying to discover how exercise can change telomeres and whether the type and intensity of exercise motivated any of these changes. This study concluded that individuals who performed aerobic and high-intensity interval training “had much longer telomeres in their white blood cells” than from the beginning of this experiment. In addition, studies found that there was a higher telomerase activity, which in turn does influence telomere length. Those who performed weight training did not experience any differences in telomere activity in fact, in some instances, the telomere length shortened. 

 

As said by Dr Christian Werner, these results indicate that aerobic exercise does “extend telomeres and slow cellular-level ageing”. On the contrary, individuals performing anaerobic high resistant training produce less nitric oxide which inhibits telomerase activity and therefore results in a shorter telomere.

Even though findings show that certain types of exercises, such as weight training, do not contribute to a higher telomerase activity, they are all very beneficial to people’s health. Werner concludes that “exercise of any kind may change the nature of ageing” and highlights that physical activity is therefore beneficial to any age group.