Exercise to Protect Aging Bodies
Courtesy of Time Magazine
We all know that exercise is good for you. Staying physically active helps keep your heart healthy, your muscles strong and, in cancer patients, has even been shown to ward off relapse. Now, a series of independently conducted studies on the effects of exercise in healthy older adults, published Monday in the Archives of Internal Medicine, confirms that logging time at the gym not only helps maintain good health, but may even prevent the onset of chronic diseases, such as heart disease, osteoarthritis and dementia.
In one surprising trial, researchers led by Dr. Teresa Liu-Ambrose at the University of British Columbia randomly assigned 155 aging women to three separate groups and directly compared the cognitive effects of two types of exercise: resistance training, done once or twice weekly, in which participants worked out with free weights, weight machines and did squats and lunges, versus toning and balance exercises, which participants did twice a week.
By the end of the year-long study, the women who weight-trained saw an improvement in their performance on cognitive tests of memory and learning, as well as executive functions such as decision making and conflict resolution - women who trained once a week improved their scores in executive functioning by 12.6% - while those who did balance and toning exercises showed no such improvement. The muscle-strengthening exercise also helped the volunteers, aged 65 to 75, boost their walking speed, a commonly used indicator of overall health status in the elderly, as faster pace has been linked with lower mortality.
