How you can slow down aging with sport

How you can slow down aging with sport: Without anti-aging without expensive creams, treatments, etc.? It’s possible! A new study shows which sport keeps you young the longest.

It has long been no secret that sport and exercise are important for health. If you exercise a lot, your physical activity not only improves the health of your cardiovascular system , but can also prevent cancer and obesity. A new study from the University Hospital of Erlangen has now shown that sport also has a positive effect on cell aging and thus has a natural anti-aging effect .

There is no question that no one can stop aging completely. Accepting that the body changes as we get older is simply part of life. But there is no need to let yourself go as we get older, because a healthy lifestyle consisting of a balanced diet, sufficient sleep and plenty of exercise protects our cells significantly from aging. Researchers at the Hector Center in Erlangen investigated the influence of various types of sport on cell aging as part of their study.

The researchers used the length of the telomeres in the blood cells as a measure of biological age. Telomeres are the end sections of chromosomes that become increasingly shorter with each cell division. Therefore, the aging process can be determined by precisely measuring the length of the telomeres.

Sport and ageing: comparison of different sports

In order to determine whether and to what extent different sports have an anti-aging effect, 167 patients with obesity or metabolic syndrome were examined and randomly divided into three different training groups and a control group in which no sports were played. The training groups trained with the following three popular sports:

1. low-volume interval endurance training: LOW-HIIT, five times one minute of intensive exercise intervals on a bicycle ergometer (HIIT means High Intensity Interval Training and combines short phases of intense exercise with short recovery phases),
2. Whole body electromyostimulation: WB-EMS, 20-minute muscle stimulation,
3. One-set strength training: one exercise per major muscle group.

Anti-aging effect proven in the low-HIIT group

The results of the study show that all three active training groups achieved positive effects from the training. All participants experienced a significant loss of weight and waist circumference, as well as improvements in various cardiometabolic risk markers such as blood pressure . The best results were achieved with low-HIIT and strength training .

However, an anti-aging effect was only observed in the low-HIIT group, which showed a significant increase in telomere length after the study phase. The results of the study therefore show that targeted training, even if only to a small extent, can have a positive influence on cell aging. Cardiovascular training such as low-HIIT appears to be more beneficial than strength training. Nevertheless, sports physician and scientist Professor Dejan Reljic emphasizes how important strength training is for maintaining and increasing muscle mass and muscle strength.