Scientists have identified multiple genes that regulate physical strength and biological age. Most notable among them are those involved in the sustainability of our muscle tissue. It’s the decrease in the expression of these genes that causes our muscle to deteriorate dragging down our healing power.
When does the aging process start?
We can’t possibly stop the clock from ticking – chronological aging starts from the minute we are born.
It’s certainly an inevitable process. But there’s also biological aging and growing evidence indicates that this kind of aging can be slowed and even reversed, particularly in the muscle tissue.
The reason: muscle aging isn’t necessarily chronological.
A 60-year-old can have a muscular gene profile similar to a person 30 years old. And a 30-year-old person can already be expressing genes of a 60-year-old.
Muscle aging can start young, as early as the third decade of life. Many young adults unknowingly suffer from symptoms of muscle aging due to physical inactivity, poor diet, stress and substance abuse, and these become more and more notable as time goes by.
For the most part, as a muscle ages, it loses its aerobic capacity and strength, as well as size. This is how the vast majority of people experience physical aging today.
Is it possible to stop this process?
Yes, if we learn what mechanisms enable our muscle to resist premature aging, and, how to trigger them. This is where our daily activities can become essential to this process. How we exercise, how we eat, and even how we rest translate into gene activities that turn on mechanisms that dictate whether we age or stay young.
Muscle Downgrade –
You need to understand what muscle downgrade means.
Muscle downgrade is a major blow to your body. It’s associated with more than just loss of muscle size and strength. It can actually lead to a total metabolic decline.
The biological role of skeletal muscles goes far beyond locomotion. Our muscular system is our largest energy facility responsible for keeping our metabolic system intact. It essentially protects us against metabolic and hormonal decline, obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. It also enhances our brain function and keeps our body young.
Given this, the downgrading of muscle tissue can lead to a major health crisis on a scale far beyond what’s commonly believed. The loss of muscle means loss of energy, a tendency to gain excess weight, accelerated aging and a reduction in your healing ability adding to your vulnerability to disease.
This muscle downgrading is a major contributing factor behind the current epidemic of obesity, diabetes, and related diseases. It’s becoming crystal clear that the benefits our muscular system provides us are essential to our health.
Translated it means – keeping your body in shape not only makes you feel younger and stronger but also might just save your life!
Proper Exercise –
Regular aerobic exercise – which means contracting your muscles many times with little or no resistance – DOES NOT prevent loss of musclemass. Runners still lose muscle mass even if they’re highly active.
You cannot expect anti-aging benefits from low intensity, endurance type activities. Walking is great exercise, however, it is not enough to maintain overall muscle mass and cannot make anyone stronger. Your muscles need direct brief bouts of intensity (degree of workload) and strength training exercise is the perfect fit.
Living a sedentary lifestyle or not doing enough muscle building and maintenance activity will not help you look and feel young because looking young requires muscle tone. Proper strength training exercise, the kind that moves muscles through their full range of motion, is key to the firm, lean, shapely, healthy body we all envy.
Fortunately, muscle strength can be regained with simple strength training exercises and it is never too late to start. Recent studies suggest that two to three months of strength building exercise is empowered to reverse decades of muscle loss.
Muscle strength not only means making every task and activity you do easier in your everyday life, but it relates to control of body weight, bone health, cellular rejuvenation and the reduced risk of certain diseases.
Body fat often increases proportionately, when muscle declines, even if it does not register on the bathroom scale as it displaces and hides the lost muscle tissue. Fat can also be residing deep inside your body and it is this increased body fat that increases the risk of some cancers, diabetes and heart disease.
The best thing you can do for yourself is to build healthy new muscle tissue. This will act as a blood sugar sink, using up excess blood glucose every minute of the day and night. In other words, strength training exercise improves your body’s ability to control blood sugar levels and respond to insulin at every possible step in the process.
These are the keys to preventing pre-diabetes as well as slowing the aging process.
Strength training exercise is critical when it comes to einvigorating your body’s glucose tolerance and increasing your muscle’s insulin sensitivity. This lowers your diabetes risk and helps to lower body fat. It also improves your body composition – your muscle/fat ratio, to a healthier level.
No amount of any anti-aging product or procedure is ever going to replace putting a bit of effort into an exercise program. Proper exercise makes us feel better and stronger and enriches our life so we can do more.
The right type of exercise gets our blood pumping. It is one of the most valuable self-healing, anti-aging tools known to mankind. You won’t need to be looking for other quick fix temporary anti-aging methods when you kick in your strength training program.
If you allow yourself to live a no exercise lifestyle and continue to do so as well as spend most of your time sitting, you are passing up the chance to harness the rejuvenating power of your very own stem cells, your growth and repair mechanism, your personal self healing mechanism and you are condemning your body to a slow, inevitable decline.
Added Benefit Detoxification –
When you work your muscles your body reaps another benefit – detoxification. This is the process of forcing out the potentially destructive poisons we have accumulated from chemicals that find their way into our bodies and into our cells. As the cells are cleansed they become more active and “alive” and are better able to do their job. The end result is you look more vibrant and youthful.
The earlier you get started with your exercise program the better you are able to prepare for and fight off the aging process ahead. Although your skin will continue to age you can do much to keep it young – from the inside where it really counts.
Extend your years of vitality and dial in at last 20 more years of peak performance living
“Reclaim Your Longevity” helps you do just that…
Everything you need to know about a healthy metabolism, diet, hormones and exercise are included.For more tools and resources from Carolyn Hansen to assist you in attaining your health and fitness goals please visit:
