24.09.2023

Do people who exercise a lot age faster?

The never ending learning to develop awareness, understanding, knowledge, application, and practicing as a good habit for own self growth and enabling to be shared with an immediate family members and close associates.

By Berg

Photo Credits: Pexels

Do people who exercise a lot age faster?

Yes and no. It depends on what you mean by “a lot.”

On one hand, four of the best predictors for longevity are:

1. Lean muscle mass

2. Leg strength

3.Cardiorespiratory endurance

4. Physical mobility and flexibility

All of these qualities are achieved almost exclusively through regular exercise. So regular exercise will help you live longer and this what everyone wanted to achieve. Want to, wish to, hope to, dream to, tomorrow will do but without doing and practicing as way of life, it will lead to nowhere.

In fact, physical fitness actually decreases your so-called “fitness age”, which is a better predictor of longevity than your chronological age. So if you are fifty years old but have a fitness age of thirty, you’d be expected to live longer than another fifty-year-old with a fitness age of seventy.

In other words, people who are physically fit actually age slower than others. And being physically fit requires regular exercise.

On the other hand, extreme endurance exercise can lead to potentially fatal heart damage. It can also compromise your lean muscle mass, leg strength and mobility, thus affecting your longevity.

In this context, “extreme endurance exercise” means regularly training for and competing in events such as marathons, ultramarathons, ironman distance triathlons, and very long distance bicycle or cross-country skiing races.

Picture: Men's Fitness

In other words, regularly logging 100 miles of running or 200 miles of cycling every week can lead to heart problems and an early death.

Given the evidence, the best approach for longevity seems to be balancing strength, endurance and mobility training. It is quite possible to achieve the levels of physical fitness associated with longevity without extreme endurance exercise (and in the cases of lean muscle mass, leg strength and flexibility, abstaining from extreme endurance exercise is a necessity).

To test how your exercise routine is likely to affect your longevity, measure your lean muscle mass, leg strength, cardiorespiratory endurance and mobility over time and modify your program to optimize your results.

And for more on exercise and aging, check out Longevity and the Ethics of Human Movement and A Brief Argument for Strength.

Sports science, food science, dietary, nutrition, human behavioral science, physchology, human biologogy of complexity having the strong close connection between the brain, body, internal organs, spiritual, mental and physical wellbeing are always the subject of my interest since the bachelorhood days.

The never ending learning to develop awareness, understanding, knowledge, application, and practicing as a good habit for own self growth and enabling to be shared with an immediate family members and close associates. Nothing to lose but tons to gain.

About Berg

Berg has an extensive managerial career in the cutting-edge semiconductor industry spanning more than 30 years serving Motorola - a company listed by Fortune Magazine as 'One Of The World's Most Admired Companies'. In his leisure time, he enjoys working out, reading, and drawing a detailed engineering design.

Related posts