If our muscles essentially rip and reform a plethora of new cells when we workout, and aging is essentially DNA needing to cut off small chucks of DNA to split into two new host cells during the natural cell cycles, wouldn’t that mean building muscle accelerates the aging process?
I obviously recognize how regular exercise is recognized as prolonging life through the betterment of health. But I feel like all “growths” must take some small extra chuck out of our bodies’ limited telomeres each time we need to build more muscle.
I could also be using all these words incorrectly and misunderstanding the concepts haha.
In: Biology
Unfortunately I don’t have much time to write up a proper response. So I’ll keep it quite brief:
> If our muscles essentially rip and reform a plethora of new cells when we workout
This “ripping” mechanism to stimulate muscle growth is just one of many by the way. People seem to think you must injure a muscle to stimulate its growth, that’s not true. And when muscles get bigger from working out (in adults), the dominant mechanism is protein accretion. Meaning the cells get bigger (hypertrophy), not more numerous.
> aging is essentially DNA needing to cut off small chucks of DNA to split into two new host cells during the natural cell cycles
Ageing is soooo much more than telomeres. The discovery of telomeres was important because it showed there was a sort of programming ageing taking place. But ageing from passive mechanisms is substantially more complex. Also, telomeres shorten not just because of the end replication problem, but also due to accumulated damage over
time irrespective of replication.
> But I feel like all “growths” must take some small extra chuck out of our bodies’ limited telomeres each time we need to build more muscle.
Not all tissues grow, especially after reaching adulthood. Most don’t. The cell division in most tissues is done for repair and maintenance purposes. You also have stem cells for some tissues, so it’s not always one somatic cell dividing infinitely to keep its lineage present.
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