An active reminder

I have to exercise in the morning before my brain figures out what I'm doing.  ~Marsha Doble

A bear, however hard he tries, grows tubby without exercise.  ~A.A. Milne

I'm sorry to say that I've never loved to exercise, so I need to remind myself of the benefits of movement. On this first Wednesday of February, I feature a couple of recent studies that intrigue me, and maybe motivate me, at least a little.

For us oldies, excerpted from a favored nytimes wellness blog --

 

[In short - moral of the story: it’s never too late! Never too late to start moving. I like that they qualify active as “one hour per week of moderate or vigorous activity... Formal exercise was not required. An hour per week of “gardening, cleaning the car, walking at a moderate pace, or dancing” counted, said Mark Hamer, a researcher at University College London who led the study.”

“For the study, appearing in the February issue of the British Journal of Sports Medicine, scientists isolated responses from 3,454 healthy, disease-free British men and women aged between 55 and 73 who, upon joining the original study of aging, had provided clear details about their exercise habits, as well as their health, and who then had repeated that information after an additional eight years…

In the eight years between the study’s start and end, the data showed, those respondents who had been and remained physically active aged most successfully, with the lowest incidence of major chronic diseases, memory loss and physical disability. But those people who became active in middle-age after having been sedentary in prior years, about 9 percent of the total, aged almost as successfully. These late-in-life exercisers had about a seven-fold reduction in their risk of becoming ill or infirm after eight years compared with those who became or remained sedentary, even when the researchers took into account smoking, wealth and other factors.”

For you youngers, also excerpted from a recent nytimes wellness blog --

[In short, moral of the story: don’t just sit, get moving, for your brain’s sake! This study, done on rats, whose brains they say are similar enough to humans to extrapolate findings, is a bit harder to follow, with its talk of the rostral ventrolateral medulla and sympathetic nervous system (SNS) affects on vasoconstriction. But, bottom line is that being sedentary seems to cause some neurons to branch out in ways that overstimulate the SNS with potential increased blood pressure and heart disease.]

“For a study recently published in The Journal of Comparative Neurology, scientists at Wayne State University School of Medicine and other institutions gathered a dozen rats. They settled half of them in cages with running wheels and let the animals run at will. Rats like running, and these animals were soon covering about three miles a day on their wheels. The other rats were housed in cages without wheels and remained sedentary.

After almost three months of resting or running, the animals were injected with a special dye that colors certain neurons in the brain…

And, as it turned out, when the scientists looked inside the brains of their rats after the animals had been active or sedentary for about 12 weeks, they found noticeable differences between the two groups in the shape of some of the neurons in that region of the brain.

Using a computerized digitizing program to recreate the inside of the animals’ brains, the scientists established that the neurons in the brains of the running rats were still shaped much as they had been at the start of the study and were functioning normally.

But many of the neurons in the brains of the sedentary rats had sprouted far more new tentacle-like arms known as branches. Branches connect healthy neurons into the nervous system. But these neurons now had more branches than normal neurons would have, making them more sensitive to stimuli and apt to zap scattershot messages into the nervous system.

In effect, these neurons had changed in ways that made them likely to overstimulate the sympathetic nervous system, potentially increasing blood pressure and contributing to the development of heart disease.”

I'm in Minnesota: it seems harder to exercise when it’s subzero outside! (I better qualify that: it’s harder for some of us, not all of us. A few of us seem to do just fine in the cold – namely my CFR office/boss Christopher, see “Didn’t Get Froze”).

Even though it's not easy to exercise, maybe many of us can keep exploring ways to be active? 

May your February include warmth in the midst of cold, and plenty of movement. As always, I wish for only and all goodness for you.

"Movement is a medicine for creating change in a person's physical, emotional, and mental states."  ~Carol Welch

“I don’t know about you, but I’m running hard for the finish line. I’m giving it everything I’ve got. No sloppy living for me! I’m staying alert and in top condition. I’m not going to get caught napping, telling everyone else all about it and then missing out myself.”  – I Corinthians 9:26-27, The Message paraphrase

Take care of your body. It's the only place you have to live. ~ Jim Rohn