Stay Younger For Longer With H.I.T.
Exercise’s King of anti-aging is easy to implement
We all want to look younger, or at least young and healthy for our age. In fact, I don’t know anyone who doesn’t do at least something for their health and wellbeing.
It’s not the 80’s anymore. Decades of excess are not a good look.
Thankfully there are things we can do that have a huge impact on how we look, move and feel. We can avoid or moderate alcohol and high sugar foods which attack our skin and leave us collagen deficient.
We can do what we can to avoid chronic stress — which is a big age accelerant — by learning to regulate our emotions through meditation and psychological techniques like CBT and Stoicism.
And, we can move more.
We are no longer classified as a roaming, opportunistic carnivore/grazing species. We are now desk-bound most days and order our breakfast, lunch and dinners on billion-dollar apps. Most of us are overweight and most of us, even if we do work out are insulin resistant.
This doesn’t bode well for our longevity strategies, nor does it need to be our destiny. We can and maybe we should take our age into our own hands and enter the world of high-intensity interval training. HIT for short.
HIT is classed as any exercise that involves a burst of super high-intensity activity followed by a low-intensity recovery period, i.e the interval. It can be done in a million ways, including with kettlebells, an exercise bike or a running machine.
This is a game-changer for your aging process and has been shown to improve and reverse the diminishing ability of our mitochondria to generate energy from our cells.
A study by Streekumaran Nair of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, USA assigned two groups of people a regimen of HIT, weight training or a combination of both over a period of three months. The age ranges were 18–30 and 65–80.
Measurements were taken on their muscles (biopsies) before and after to measure the results. Here is what they found.
- The HIT regimen increased the power of their mitochondria within cells to create energy by 49 per cent in the 18–30 group and a staggering 69 per cent in the older group.
- It halted the decline of decreased mitochondrial related activities such as fatigue and reduction in the efficacy of the muscles to burn excess blood sugar. In the older group, this was reversed.
- They also saw big increases in their ability to consume oxygen under a high pressured intense burst of activity. 28% in the younger group and a bit less in the older group.
These results were only visible in the HIT group. The weight trainers saw none of the above benefits at all. They did increase muscle mass. The mixed group saw moderate gains only.
To sum it up, weight training is a good way to stave off muscle and bone degradation, but if you want to stay young and energised on a cellular level by keeping your mitochondria in tip-top condition you may want to give HIT a try.
Even better if you stack it with stress reduction, weight and low sugar and alcohol intake.
Your aging process is in your hands, albeit indirectly.
Chose well.
