If Aging is in a nutshell the exhaustion of the body’s capability to fix itself, why exercise and bodybuilding (in a healthy approach) don’t make that worst?
In: Biology
Because you’re constantly making repairs necessary while your body is still very capable of adjusting itself, you end up with a better level of cell repair, stem cell activity, bone density, and muscle density.
Once all those things begin deteriorating with age, you’re starting from a much higher baseline than someone with a sedentary lifestyle that never worked out. Meaning you won’t hit critical levels of disrepair, but they will at some point.
Some of the bigger issues associated with aging are the impacts it has on muscle loss and bone density. These are both combatted by lifting weights. By maintaining bone density and muscle capacity you’re better able to function on a day to day basis and reduce the risk of injury. By reducing the risk of injury and maintaining mobility you remain more active and by remaining more active you continue to benefit from all the positives of an active lifestyle. This is the simplest simplest way to breakdown increasing overall enjoyment of life in old age.
Almost everything starts from muscle loss and deterioration of bone density and snowballs from them. It’s why when old people fall it’s such a huge issue so if you’re able to make it so that if you take a tumble you only end up with a really bad bruise or at worst a fractured bone instead of needing an entire hip replacement that’s massive. Fewer injuries mean fewer surgeries. It means needing to take less medication.
Another factor is just how little a lot of old people eat. They just aren’t hungry. They don’t have the appetite. Plus everything hurts. So it’s just a hassle. But if you continue to remain active you’ll continue to burn through calories which will make you hungry and ensure you continue to take in enough nutrients from your food.
A healthy approach is the key there. You can’t throw around the same kind of deadlifts at 60 as you were at 30. You need to adjust your routines to account for having an older body that is slower to repair itself otherwise your exercise risks making it worse.
You also can’t do anything about causes of mortality that just increase in chance as you age. Like cancer for example. But what you can do is ensure everything else is functioning as well as possible to give you the best chance possible to deal with the other stuff.
Think of it this way: Two people buy a car in 1959 and one of them maintains it beautifully while the other does just the bare minimum. 50 years later how does each car look?
The most concerning thing is that it doesn’t even take much effort to meet the recommendations proposed by research. The bare minimum levels of effort you need to put into exercising to see massive positive returns is so minuscule that it’s honestly pathetic the vast majority of the people out there aren’t hitting it. It’s like 30 minutes of light exercise a day lol. Which okay that won’t do anything for increasing bone density but even for that it doesn’t take nearly as much effort as people make it seem.
Practice consumption of trash in moderation. Ensure you’re getting enough nutrients (IMO eating healthy is less about removing the bad stuff than it is ensuring you’re getting the good stuff). Move around for at least half an hour a day. Try to do some kind of strength based training (whether it’s weight or body weight based is irrelevant) a 2 (preferably 3) times a week. Pay serious serious attention to the liquid calories you consume. And you’d be blown away at the kind of improvement you feel with just that little bit of effort.
But unfortunately when people decide to get “healthy” they usually overshoot it and do too mud too fast and fail.
It’s wrong to think of aging as you body no longer being able to repair itself, its more like your body no longer being WILLING to repair itself. Just look at a 15yr old dog that has all the same sort of issues you’d expect in an 80yr old human. The biology isn’t really much different, it’s just that we have different “planned” obsolescence dates.
The mechanisms behind aging are insanely complicated and no one can answer in this format. A simplistic answer would be that exercise creates mitochondrial adaptations that allow healthy cells to stay alive while unhealthy cells are destroyed.
“Bodybuilding “ prevents aging by allowing people to continue doing activities that promote longevity such as staying mobile, being able to fall without breaking bones, helping prevent insulin resistance and diabetes, being able to participate in social activities, etc. injury prevention is the big one.
At some point exercise would in fact make you worse at any age, and especially as you get older there is more of a limit to its benefit. Bodybuilding is a separate thing entirely so I don’t know why you brought that up.
But it’s not like you have a set number of repairs built into your body. You can heal over and over and over until aging overcomes that ability. Some of what you think of as “repair” is simply the normal turn over of cells in various tissues which happens whether you get injured or not. There are specific things that happen in repair too, but the mechanism is more or less the same. Stem cells make new cells. New cells replace the damaged one. New proteins are made to replace the ones that were lost.
Aging is the slow accumulated damage and destruction of various genes that run this whole show, from regular maintenance to tissue strength, immune system function, digestion, nerve transmission etc.
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