CATÁLOGO ATOMOXETINA

If you’ve been physically active all your life, you’re probably already

“physiologically” younger than your chronological age. But if you’re a lapsed exerciser or really haven’t ever done much physical activity at all, you can still make significant headway in the fight against aging. Though I wouldn’t go as far as to say that exercise is the

fountain of youth, evidence suggests that, in many ways, it’s the closest thing

we’ve got. Here are some reasons why:

Exercise prevents the deterioration of muscle and bone. By some calculations,

most women begin losing about 1

percent of muscle mass per year after the age of forty; men begin losing muscle in their twenties. That loss of muscle tissue

also contributes to a big loss in strength: Muscular strength can drop by as much as 30 to 40 percent by the time you’re in your eighties. A lot of people are

resigned to their musculature growing flabbier and weaker with age; they figure it’s a fact of life. But the truth is, it’s not inevitable. The blame for most muscle tissue and muscle strength loss can be laid squarely at the feet of

inactivity. I hate to trot out an old cliché, but it’s undeniably true: Use it or lose it. Countless studies have shown that if you strength train you can regain and/or maintain muscle volume, endurance, and power—even if you’re ninety years old.

Beyond the obvious—no one wants to end up as the older person (or even

the middle-aged person) who has trouble pushing open a door or transporting his body around—there are good reasons to preserve muscle. Muscle tissue is

calorie-hungry, meaning that it takes a lot of energy to maintain it. The more muscle you have, the more calories you burn each day, which helps you limit weight gain. One reason that so many people end up gaining weight in middle age—and having a higher likelihood of obesity-related conditions such as heart disease, high blood pressure, and

diabetes—is because muscle loss has left them with a lowered ability to burn calories. When you hold on to muscle, you hold on to your calorie-burning

power, too.

Strength training is the best way to build and preserve muscle. When you strength train by doing exercises with dumbbells (my preference for most people), resistance bands, or weight machines, the load creates microtears in the muscles, and the body, in repairing those tears, generates larger, denser muscles. Another thing strength training does is activate nerves within the

muscles that allow them to respond to challenges more effectively.

Strength training also allows you to take aim at another common age-related issue: bone loss. Bone tissue may seem static, but in fact your body is constantly breaking down bone and rebuilding it.

When you’re young, your body breaks down and rebuilds bone in equal

measure, but the balance gradually shifts as you get older. By the time most

people are in their forties and fifties, a confluence of factors, including, in women, loss of estrogen, has created enough of an imbalance to cause bone thinning. People who have a particularly large imbalance of breakdown and

buildup are at risk for the brittle bone disease osteoporosis. But when you strength train, your muscles tug on your bones, triggering the rebuilding process and keeping the bones healthy. Weight- bearing cardiovascular exercise— anything that involves impact, such as

running, walking, stair stepping, aerobic dance—also helps build bone. It’s worth noting that when you strength train and choose a weight-bearing activity as your cardiovascular exercise, you double your efforts to prevent age-related bone loss.

Exercise keeps age-related diseases at bay and reduces the likelihood of middle-age spread. Cardiovascular

exercise (also known as aerobic

exercise) has different anti-aging effects than strength training, but they are no less amazing. I’ll get to the specifics about those effects shortly, but first let me explain what it means to improve

your cardiovascular system, which is made up of your heart and the network of blood vessels that course through your body. When your cardiovascular system is fit, it has a heightened ability to

process oxygen and deliver it to your working muscles. That makes movement, especially sustained movement,

noticeably easier. Running to catch a bus, going up stairs, walking to the store, keeping up with a child, require far less effort when you have cardiovascular power and endurance. A fit

cardiovascular system even works more efficiently when you’re at rest. With all that energy saved you inevitably feel less fatigued.

your breathing and make your heart work harder for a continuous and extended period of time significantly improve your cardiovascular system. These type of workouts all involve repetitive

motion and engage your large muscle groups, but most important they allow you to sustain movement. Brisk walking, running, swimming, cycling, elliptical training, stair stepping, and aerobic dance all fit the bill. By contrast, an activity such as tennis, which is great for balance and hand-eye coordination, isn’t an ideal cardiovascular activity, because it typically requires too much starting and stopping. Strength training is another activity that is sometimes thought to have

aerobic benefits; however, while it’s wonderful for muscle strengthening, it doesn’t challenge the cardiovascular system.

Though you’re born with an innate amount of cardiovascular ability (or aerobic capacity, as it’s often called), it can begin to decline at a relatively early age. If you’re very inactive, the

deterioration starts sometime in your twenties and then accelerates with each decade. But if you engage in consistent, moderate-to-high-level cardiovascular exercise, you can maintain your

cardiovascular ability and even see improvement well into your thirties, forties, and beyond. Regular

other changes in the body that

significantly lower the risk of many age- related diseases. For instance, it’s long been known that cardiovascular exercise raises levels of HDL (good) cholesterol, helping to protect against heart disease. It also increases insulin sensitivity, lowering the risk of diabetes, and

reduces inflammation, which is linked to a number of life-threatening conditions (see box here).

Like strength training, cardiovascular exercise helps you fight midlife weight gain, too. It’s believed that most adults gain about ten pounds per decade, but data collected for the National Runners’ Health Study, a project being conducted

at the U.S. Department of Energy’s

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, shows that people who are consistently active put on significantly fewer pounds than that. And most likely it’s not just because exercise burns

calories while you’re doing it. When you regularly engage in cardiovascular

exercise, you increase the production and storage of something called aerobic enzymes. These enzymes do a great job of boosting your metabolism, the rate at which you burn calories, as well as helping the body burn more fat. In large part due to these enzymes, regular exercisers simply incinerate more calories twenty-four hours a day. Since the metabolism typically slows down

with age, that’s a boost everyone over the age of thirty can use.

There’s another way cardiovascular exercise affects body weight. Men are prone to gaining weight in their bellies all through their lives. As women get older, that tendency increases and asserts itself in them as well. Most women typically gain fat in their arms, legs, and hips until menopause, when hormone levels shift and they begin storing what is known as intra- abdominal fat, located deep in the abdominal cavity. This fat puts you at greater risk for heart disease, stroke, and cancer. Remarkably, cardiovascular exercise seems to target intra-abdominal

fat. One study found that women on an aerobic exercise program lost 3 to 7 percent of their belly fat—without even changing their eating habits.

Offsetting the Aging