Exercise can help slow the aging process

Lace up those sneakers. Exercise — specifically high-intensity interval training — slows down the aging process.

A new study published in the journal Cell Metabolism noted that any kind of exercise is better than none, but it’s the high-intensity interval training that does best in reversing age-related changes at the cellular level. Though this works for people of all ages, it seems to offer more benefits to older people.

HIIT, as it is commonly known, requires short bursts of intense aerobic activity, intermixed with longer stretches of moderate exercise. Participating in this kind of training encourages cells to make more proteins to fuel the energy producing cellular mechanism. This, in turn, arrests the aging process.

The study found that younger people participating in HIIT showed a 49 percent increase in mitochondrial capacity and the older group saw a 69 percent. (Mitochondria are the cells’ powerhouses, responsible for producing the molecule that transports chemical energy within cells.)

“Based on everything we know, there’s no substitute for these exercise programs when it comes to delaying the aging process,” Dr. Sreekumaran Nair, senior author of the study and a diabetes researcher at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., told Medical News. “These things we are seeing cannot be done by any medicine.”

The study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, used two sets of volunteers: the younger set ranged in age from 18 to 30 and the older ranged in age between 65 and 80. Those studied were then divided into three different supervised exercise training programs that lasted three months. The mixed-age HIIT group did three days a week of cycling, with high-intensity bouts alternating with low-intensity pedaling, and two days a week of moderately difficult treadmill walking.

A strength training group did weights for lower and upper body muscles two days each week, while a third group cycled and lifted weight five days a week, but always less strenuously than the two other groups.

Not surprisingly, the researchers found that strength training was most effective for building muscle mass and for improving strength — important because both qualities decline with age — but the group that participated in HIIT earned the best results at the cellular level. HIIT seemed to reverse the age-related decline in both mitochondrial function and muscle-building proteins.

So how should you plan for your exercise week? “If people have to pick one exercise,” Nair said, “I would recommend high-intensity interval training, but I think it would be more beneficial if they could do three to four days of interval training and then a couple of days of strength training.”