What kind of exercise makes you younger?
Photo: Ketut Subiyanto
Why This Matters
You might spend your teens and early twenties wishing you were older - why can’t I rent a car until I’m twenty-five? you demand - but many of us spend the rest our lives wishing we were younger. At the very least, we wish we could slow down how quickly we’re aging. We wish we felt a little more energetic and a lot less tired.
The good news? You can slow down how quickly you’re aging. And you don’t have to be a billionaire investing in fringe medical procedures to do it.
The Science
First, we need to introduce something called epigenetics. The concept is a bit tricky, so an analogy helps. Imagine that your DNA is the master instruction book for building and maintaining your body. Your DNA doesn’t change over time (you’ll die with the same DNA you were born with), but how your body reads that instruction book can change.
This is where epigenetics comes in: it’s like a layer of sticky notes and highlighters that tell the body which sections of the DNA to read and which sections to ignore on any given day. These sticky notes can lead your body to age faster or slower, depending on how your body is reading your personal instruction manual.
Now let’s dive into the specific research. A research team out of Poland studied what’s known as the “epigenetic clocks” of 1000 people. If we push the analogy a little further, an epigenetic clock is a diagnostic tool that can scan all of those sticky notes and determine how much wear and tear there is on your instruction manual. Is your instruction manual looking pretty worn and tattered, or is it relatively fresh, given your age?
In sum, the researchers were asking, “At the DNA and cellular level, which people seem older or younger than their actual age, and what are those people doing differently?”
They found that a number of key behaviors changed how quickly a person was aging and several of them are behaviors you can change immediately.
The two behaviors that had the biggest positive impact in making cells younger were 1) eating more vegetables (at least 3-4 servings a day) and 2) exercising daily. Lots of fruit didn’t work - it had to be vegetables.
And the single exercise that had the biggest aging benefit? Yoga. Practice yoga regularly and your instruction manual actually rejuvenates, making your cells younger. The researchers looked at many different forms of exercise, everything from cycling to running, from to weight-lifting to cross fit, and yoga was the winner.
There are two behaviors that age you a lot, however. Smoking topped the list in this study, and eating a lot of meat came in second. (Being male also made for older instruction manuals, but that’s not easily changed). The good news is that former smokers looked almost as young as non-smokers, so don’t despair if you’ve been smoking for a decade. Giving up smoking now is worth it.
Key Takeaways
If you want to slow down your body’s aging, start doing three things: Eat at least 3-4 servings of vegetables a day, get some physical activity every day, and start doing yoga regularly.
You should also stop doing two things: Stop smoking and reduce your consumption of meat. You don’t have to go all-out vegetarian, but eat less meat and your cells will start getting younger.