When it comes to living a long and healthy life, you get a ton of anti-aging benefits by going after just one thing:
Muscle.
Keep what you have – and build more.
If you perform strength training for a year, you can restore the muscle mass you’ve lost – and then build even more muscle than you had in middle age.
And if you’re now in middle age, you want to build as much muscle as possible so you remain fit far into your “old” age.
Your ability to perform what’s called “tasks of daily living” depends on muscle.
And you want to know you can stand up, sit down, walk, cook, clean and garden without falling or injuring yourself.
And that’s just the beginning.
A Recent Study Says Fitness Beats Every Other Cardiovascular Risk Factor
And that includes smoking – which I find crazy, but there it is.
The researchers followed 6,500 patients who were 70 years old or older for fifteen years.
They measured how these patients ranked on four of the usual risk factors for heart disease:
* High cholesterol
* Smoking
* High blood pressure
* Diabetes
They also measured the patients’ levels of fitness – which ranged from low to high.
During those fifteen years, 2,526 people died.
The patients who were least physically fit had the highest chance of dying, no matter how many of those risk factors they had.
The patients who were MOST physically fit had the LOWEST chance of dying, no matter how many of those risk factors they had. Yes, even if they smoked.
The conclusion is clear: Build and keep more muscle so you stay fit.
Many Studies Show Exercise Builds and Maintains Muscle and Therefore Helps Prevent and Cure Those Risk Factors
Just in the past ten years or so, medical science has learned that when your muscles are at work (moving or exercising), they generate beneficial biochemicals called myokines.
And myokines spread throughout your body, signaling your organs and cells in an incredible number of healthy ways.
In other words – your muscles are NOT just about getting stronger.
That’s important, but your muscle tissue also does far, far more to keep you young and healthy.
Strength training lowers your LDL bad cholesterol.
Building muscle also has many huge beneficial effects on your blood system. It helps build new blood vessels so every cell of your body is fully oxygenated.
This not only transports more oxygen and nutrition to all your cells – increasing the size of your circulatory system lowers your blood pressure.
Muscle Mass and Diabetes
Basically, diabetes is a disease where your cells resist accepting the blood sugar they need to function. Insulin is the hormone that transports sugar – glucose – from your blood into your cells. Therefore, diabetes is a disease of insulin resistance.
Your muscles are the largest store of glucose in your body.
Therefore, having more muscle increases your insulin sensitivity, the opposite of resistance.
With more muscle mass, your body can hold more glucose to burn for energy – without turning it into stored fat.
Muscle Fights Obesity
You’ve no doubt heard that when you eat too much, the excess calories are stored in your body as fat.
What the doctors don’t tell you – muscle and fat in your body compete with each other for calories. That is, excess calories can go to build more muscle, not more fat.
Having plenty of myokines shifts the balance between muscle and fat. That is, the more muscle you have, the more myokines the muscle cells produce.
The more myokines your muscles produce, the more those excess calories go into making new muscle, not new fat.
Therefore, by working your muscles hard, you lose fat and gain muscle.
Muscle myokines reduce inflammatory cytokines. According to a study done in Japan, inflammation is the most accurate biomarker of aging.
These extraordinary benefits of having plenty of muscle mass go a long way to explaining the results of that study.
Muscle cells actively fight to reduce the four cardiovascular risk factors. They work to reduce the health hazards of high cholesterol, diabetes, and high blood pressure.
And, apparently, getting lots of exercise also reduces the damage done to you by smoking cigarettes.
Other Benefits of Working Muscles
They generate myokines that help you grow more bone, preventing or reducing osteoporosis.
Some myokines inhibit the growth of cancer cells in your breasts and tumors in your gut.
They encourage the growth of mitochondria in your fat cells. That turns white fat (which stores energy) into brown fat – which burns energy.
Working muscles increase brain-derived neurotropic factor (BDNF), which improves your brain’s thinking speed and ability to learn and remember.
How to Exercise
1. Walking – Get outside and . . . walk. And keep walking.
2. Cycling indoors – Get yourself an indoor exercise bike. You can use it while you’re watching TV, checking Facebook, listening to music and reading. You can do it whenever you’re at home – at any time, in any weather.
3. Push, Pull, Press, Lift, Carry – Challenge your strength with both your arms and your legs. Push against the wall. Push upward. Perform pushups and squats. Push up and press down. Lift something heavy. Look on Youtube for exercises. Move slowly and carefully.
Do all this as intensely as possible – then rest several days. When you’re good at challenging all your muscles in all directions, you can get a great workout in 15 minutes – and do it just once a week.
Keep and build your muscles – and they will keep you healthy and alive for many years.
