An article from Time magazine this week explores how exercise improves both physical and cognitive health as we age. The author reports on one study that found that female subjects, age 65-75, significantly improved their walking speed (an indicator of overall health) and executive functioning (memory, organization, etc.) after one year of weekly resistance training.
In this particular study, the same improvements were not seen in women who performed only toning and balance exercises when compared to the resistance training group.
However, other forms of exercise have been shown to improve different measures of health. This New York Times article describes how when active and sedentary groups of older adults are compared, the active adults show marked improvement in something called telomere length.
Telomeres are the end-caps of DNA strands (picture them as the ends of a fiber-optic wire). Each time cells reproduce, these ends get a little bit shorter. Therefore, scientists can use them to measure aging in the body.
Researchers found that while telomeres in older adults were still shortened when compared to younger subjects, the telomers of the more active older adults remained much longer than those of adults who did not exercise. In older runners, for example, loss of telomere length was reduced by as much as 75%
Exercise has been shown in previous studies to modify the expression of genes, in effect making exercisers physiologically 'younger.' And we know that resistance exercise in particular plays an important role in reducing the risk of sarcopenia.
Check out the American College of Sports Medicine for guidelines on exercise for older adults.
