What is Chronological age & Biological age?
Chronological age: the number of birthdays you’ve had.
Biological age: how old your body appears to be — how well your organs, hormones, muscles, and brain work, and how much wear and tear your cells have gone through.
If you take good care of your body, it’s possible to be 45+ years old chronologically with a 25-year-old biological age. At the same time, if you neglect your body by not keeping it fit, you can have a 50-year-old biological age when you hit your 30th birthday.
Now let’s see How Exercise help you in Reversing your Biological age
#1 Mitochondria are the power plants of our cells - they crank out the energy that runs everything your body does, from breathing to moving to thinking. Typically they slow down as we age and start producing less energy. Slower mitochondria are a hallmark of aging and come with fatigue, decreased muscle mass and brain function, declining cardiovascular health, and more.
Exercise maximum amount of energy your mitochondria can produce, giving you a bigger energy reserve in your day-to-day life.
#2 Autophagy, the method by which our body cleans out damaged cells and toxins, helps you regenerate newer, healthier cells. Over time, our cells accumulate a variety of dead organelles, damaged proteins, and oxidized particles that clog the body's inner workings. This accelerates aging, induces dementia, and increases the risk of cancer, as well as other age-related diseases.
Exercise is one of the best ways to turn on autophagy. Research shows that exercise increases cellular turnover and cleans out damaged cellular parts, which links to decreased aging.
#3 Telomeres are specialized structures at the ends of linear chromosomes. A telomere is a region of repetitive nucleotide (organic molecule) sequences at each terminus of a chromosome (DNA molecule), which protects the end of the chromosome to maintain genomic stability, avoiding degradation and fusion.
As a physiological cellular process, a small part of telomeric DNA is lost with each cell division. Therefore, telomere length (TL) shortens every time a cell division occurs, which makes it a marker of biological aging. TL is also associated with a large number of age-related disorders, such as type 2 diabetes, hypertension, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, and even cancer.
When TL is short enough, damage to the DNA may cause the cell to produce non-functional proteins, which may reverberate in two different paths: (i) the non-functional cell is led to apoptosis, which is roughly the senescence process that humans age; or (ii) the non-functional cell continues to produce non-functional proteins, which may become non-functional cell and eventually becomes a cancer.
Life-long exercise practice has been shown to reduce biochemical factors related to telomere attrition, such as oxidative stress and chronic inflammation. There are also some studies reporting that sedentary behavior is associated with shorter TL, and furthermore, elite athletes and master athletes have longer TL than their non-athlete counterparts.
