The Benefits of Long-term Exercise

We all know that exercise is good for the body; we know that those who practice a sedentary lifestyle are more likely to get sick than those who exercise. We know that exercise can help prevent heart disease, cancer, and other life-threatening diseases.  But not everyone knows that long-term exercise has a very good effect on the body, an effect that all of us wants–it slows the onset of aging.

A group of German scientists  learned through research that the secret to staying young longer is linked to physical activity. According to a report that was recently published in Circulation, the journal of the American Heart Association, it was discovered by the group led by Dr. Ulrich Laufs, a professor of clinical and experimental medicine in the department of internal medicine at Saarland University in Homburg, Germany, that the telomeres of the white blood cells of endurance athletes are longer than than that of healthy non-smoking and non-drinking adults who do not exercise regularly. A telomere is a region of repetitive DNA at the end of a chromosome, it protects the end of the chromosome from damage and deterioration. Longer telomeres means longer time for cells to continue dividing during the life span of a human being.

Emmanuel Skordalakes, an assistant professor of gene expression and regulation at The Wistar Institute in Philadelphia explains that telomeres work like the way “shoelace tips prevent fraying of the laces.” According to him telomeres become shorter every time cells divide. Over the life span, human cells divide continuously, and they only stop dividing when the telomeres are too short to allow division. Once the cells stop dividing, aging sets in, and all the signs of it are felt like loss of skin elasticity, deterioration of muscle strength, and the decline of the ability to hear, see, and think clearly.

Having longer telomeres in the white blood cells is linked to long-term exercise. If you want to live younger longer, why not start exercising regularly  now while you are still young and do it for as long as you can?