You feel better when you exercise. It helps you manage your diabetes. It helps you lose weight or keep your weight in check. It helps you fit in your clothes. It helps your heart stay strong. It helps your blood fat levels get to and stay in a healthy range. It keeps your bones strong. It helps you manage stress.
AND it helps you stay young.
I’m telling you, exercise is an amazing thing.
I think I blog more about cardiovascular exercise than I do resistance training, mainly because what I do for my cardio exercise is more interesting and exciting to write about. (I mean, did you see yesterday’s blog?!)
When it comes to resistance exercise, however, I’m a huge fan and wish I were able to devote more time to it (marathons have taken precedence for the past two years). Resistance training to help me stave off muscle loss as I age is crucial. I also have one body so it’s hard to do everything I want to all the time.
I’m sure you understand.
So you can imagine how fun it is for me to spread the word about TELOMERES.
Telomeres are little pieces at the end of our cells’ DNA. With every cell division, a tiny bit at the end of that telomere is lost.
You can imagine how this story ends up. If you can’t, look at your grandparents.
With every cell division snipping off a teensy piece of DNA, we are on a limited time budget.
The 2009 Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to three scientists whose work showed that telomeres are vital to protect our cells’ DNA. Not only did their work show that the longer our telomeres the biologically younger we are, but they showed that the telomeres of middle-aged people who exercised regularly were only marginally shorter than those telomeres of people half their age who didn’t exercise regularly.
Gotta love scientific proof that regular exercise (and of course good sound nutrition) help our bodies significantly slow the aging process.
Just add it to the list of the amazing benefits of exercise.
