Exercise The Benefits For Fitness and Health
By Mark on Feb 28, 2008 in Health & Exercise
What is and are the benefits of exercise for your fitness and health ? a recent study that has been conducted in London, found some interesting facts about this particular area of health, people who tend to keep themselves fit are, generally younger biologically on the inside than their sedentary counterparts.
This is quite groundbreaking research, that has been done on humans as regards to the ageing process. A study was done on 2,041 twins to see how the overall effect of how exercise affects our bodies.
The findings
The researchers came to the conclusion that, having a sedentary lifestyle compared to a very active one does in fact play a major role in warding off life-threatening diseases. Such as cancer and heart disease, and plays a major role in warding off the effects of ageing.
It has to do with something called telemeres, and their overall length these particular structures in our bodies protect our DNA, telemeres have been looked at in various studies over time, and the data has been collated, and the same things were found all the time the telemeres, become shorter in length with age.
Which suggests that they are aging and wearing out, the researchers found out that the people who exercised every week, compared to their sedentary counterparts, had longer telemeres. It’s a well-known fact that exercise overall, does in fact have a major impact on good health.
When asked about what they thought the actual reasons for this were, they didn’t have any definitive answers, but came up with a theory that exercise stops something called oxidative stress.
What is needed
One of the researchers who conducted the study said “you can’t just go for a short walk or just round the block that isn’t good enough” for some people that might seem like enough exercise, but you really do need to work, up a sweat before you’re going to get any real benefit from exercise at all.
The conclusion
The people who exercised vigorously for three hours a week had their telemeres, measured and it was found that they were indeed longer than the people who hadn’t exercised at all, biologically they were nine years younger than their sedentary counterparts whom only did 15 minutes of exercise.
When the researches where asked what they thought, the overall reason for this was they didn’t have an answer it was more of a theory, what they said was that the exercise stops what they call oxidative stress which has a negative effect on cells.
This does correlate with something that I read in a book quite some time ago called Psycho Cybernetics, some researchers found that by putting some cells in a test tube and not moving them, they tended to die quicker, rather than ones that were shaken at regular intervals.
Source abc news
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Tags: Exercise
4 Comment(s)
By JoLynn Braley on Feb 29, 2008 | Reply
Hi Mark,
Psycho-Cybernetics is an awesome read. I don’t remember the part about the cells dying in the test tubes, that’s very interesting!
JoLynn Braley’s last blog post..Emotional Eating Experiment - Shrink Yourself by Dr. Roger Gould
By Drinking Diet on Mar 11, 2008 | Reply
I started exercising heavily the beginning of the year, the biggest benefit from exercise I’ve found is simply the feel good factor after a good work out.
Drinking Diet’s last blog post..The Problem With Lighter Life
By Fitness and Weight Loss on Jun 21, 2008 | Reply
I think that diet plays an equally important role. I once decided to try to get in shape just through exercising, and it really was not very effective. By combining a healthy / fat losing diet, exercise actually becomes easier, and the weight seems to come of much fast. Interesting to see that it affects DNA though, that is certainly a revelation.
Fitness and Weight Losss last blog post..Big Breakfast Diet Could Help You Lose Weight - Eat Like a King
By FYI on Jul 5, 2008 | Reply
Great post!