J's Big Gym

IT'S NEVER TOO LATE

I was inspired by the article in The New York Times magazine, November 28, 2010; The Incredible Flying Nonagenarian by Bruce Grierson, to share the following:


My highlights of the article are as follows:
The cohort of people 85 and older — the fastest-growing segment of the population, as it happens — is increasingly being studied for longevity clues.
Some researchers now see aging itself as a kind of mitochondrial disease. Defective mitochondria appear as we get older, and these researchers say that they rob us of endurance, strength and function. There’s evidence that for young patients with mitochondrial disease, exercise is a potent tool, slowing the symptoms. If that’s true, then exercise could also potentially be a kind of elixir of youth, combating the ravages of aging far more than we thought. 
EXERCISE HAS BEEN shown to add between six and seven years to a life span (and improve the quality of life in countless ways).

Here, though, is the radical proposition that’s starting to gain currency among researchers studying masters athletes: what if intense training does something that allows the body to regenerate itself? Two recent studies involving middle-aged runners suggest that the serious mileage they were putting in, over years and years, had protected them at the chromosomal level. It appears that exercise may stimulate the production of telomerase, an enzyme that maintains and repairs the little caps on the ends of chromosomes that keep genetic information intact when cells divide. That may explain why older athletes aren’t just more cardiovascularly fit than their sedentary counterparts — they are more free of age-related illness in general. 
Exercise training helps stop muscle strength and endurance from slipping away.  
If Tarnopolsky is right, exercise in older adults can roll back the odometer. After six months of twice weekly strength exercise training, he has shown, the biochemical, physiological and genetic signature of older muscle is “turned back” nearly 15 or 20 years. 

Kotelko herself speaks often of the perils of getting carried away. “If you undertrain, you might not finish,” she says. “If you overtrain, you might not start.”

There are many ‘seniors’ who are members of J’s BIG GYM.  Jay and the entire staff are honored and privileged to know them and see them exercising.  

The entire article is at: 
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/magazine/28athletes-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1



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