How Aging Slows Our Bodies, and How Exercise Slows Aging

After the age of 20, older generally means weaker and slower; and after the age of 60, older means quite a bit weaker and slower. The Los Angeles Times reports on what, exactly, happens to our bodies: motor neurons die, which causes connections between muscle fibers to wither, wait, there's more, large, elastic arteries including the aorta (which shuttles blood from the heart) and the carotid artery (which feeds blood to the brain) get stiffer; wear and tear builds up on the joints, connective tissue becomes less elastic, and lubricating fluids decline; and on which exercises are most useful for preventing the weakening and slowing. Michael Joyner, a professor of anesthesiology and an exercise researcher at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, tells the Times that cross-training — doing a mix of high- and low-impact exercises such as weight training, yoga and cycling — works different muscle groups and can reduce the risk of orthopedic injuries from overuse. And to prevent artery stiffening, Douglas Seals, a physiologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, says exercise is as good as anything known to science. The Times reports that, for 21 years, researchers at Stanford University have studied the effects of consistent exercise on 284 runners 50 and older. In a 2002 article in the Archives of Internal Medicine, they reported that — 13 years into the study — a control group of 156 similar people who exercised much less on the whole than the runners had a 3.3 times higher death rate than runners as well as higher rates of disabilities. In 2008, they reported that after 19 years, 15 percent of runners had died, compared with 34% of the control group. After 21 years, runners had significantly lower disability levels than non-runners; their death rates from cardiovascular events, cancer and neurologic disorders were much lower than in non-runners — 65 of the runners had died of cardiovascular, neurologic and cancer events compared with 98 deaths in the control group.

Read more in the Los Angeles Times.