#FindFit – The Truth About Lifting Weights

Resistance training is known to have a variety of benefits, such as accelerated fat loss and improved metabolic function.

While there are a multitude of benefits that result from resistance training, one of the most advantageous, in my opinion, is its protective effect on your DNA.

Your DNA is protected by telomeres, strands of genetic material that twist up into a cap at each end of each chromosome in your body. Telomeres guard your DNA against damage from cell division, oxidative stress, inflammation, and other metabolic processes that can be detrimental to chromosomes. As you age, your telomeres unwind and get shorter and shorter. The Telomere Theory of Aging theorizes that this slow destruction of your telomeres contributes to many of the diseases and neurodegenerative conditions that we associate with aging.

Following is a brief review of the important research out there, which includes studies I have cited in the past but which are important to revisit as they have established the relationship between telomeres, aging, and heavy lifting.

In the study “Resistance Exercise Reverses Aging in Human Skeletal Muscle,” it was proven that six months of progressive resistance training, i.e. “lifting heavy stuff,” made the gene expression pattern of aging mitochondria significantly younger. Essentially, lifting weights reversed nearly 40 years of aging.

Another group of researchers, hypothesizing that telomeres might indicate overall biological age, studied the telomeres of 2,401 twins via blood samples. They also had the twins fill out questionnaires on physical activity level, smoking status, disease status, and socioeconomic status.

Unsurprisingly, the researchers found that telomere length decreased with age. But they also found that the men and women who were physically active had longer telomeres than those who were sedentary—even after adjusting for age,

weight, disease, socioeconomic status, and smoking. Not only that, but participants who spent more than three hours each week engaged in vigorous physical activity (such as lifting weights) had longer telomeres than subjects ten years younger. This was a significant finding because these differences weren’t due to genes, since the subjects were twins, but rather to the lifestyle factor of exercise.

Another study compared telomere lengths in a group of powerlifters who had trained for an average of eight years against those of a group of healthy, active subjects who had no history of strength training. Telomere lengths in the powerlifters were significantly higher than those of the control group, and telomere length was positively correlated to the powerlifters’ individual records in the squat and deadlift!

Finally, another study has shown that older adults who met twice-weekly strength-training guidelines showed lower odds of dying. Data from the ‘97-’01 National Health Interview Survey, which includes more than 30,000 adults aged 65+, showed that older adults who engaged in strength-training twice a week had 46% lower odds of dying for any reason than those who did not, and they also had significantly lower odds of dying from cancer and cardiac events.

Even after adjusting for demographic variables and controlling for physical activity level, people who reported strength training saw a greater mortality benefit than those who reported physical activity (non-strength training) alone.

If you want to see how your telomeres measure up, you can have your telomere length tested by companies like SpectraCell, Repeat Diagnostics, and Life Length.

By measuring your telomere lengths, these tests can tell you your “biological age.” While your chronological age is the number of years you’ve been alive, your biological age is how long you “look” like you’ve been alive, based on a variety of biomarkers like telomere lengths.

Maybe your chronological age is 38, but you have the telomeres of a 20-year-old. If so, your biological age, according to the Telomere Theory of Aging, is 20 years old. Many aging experts believe that biological age is a better indicator of how much life you have left than your chronological age.

But recently, a new biological age testing method has emerged: epigenetic testing.

Anti-aging gurus and longevity experts have long sought the most accurate anti-aging “clocks” that will accurately determine how old or young someone is biologically. Telomeres are believed to be one of these clocks, but it’s now hypothesized that methylation-based epigenetic aging clocks are even more accurate than telomeres.

Epigenetic tests measure markers of methylation on your DNA. Methylation is like a control program for DNA expression. It switches different genes on or off by tagging sections of the genome with methylation markers, which then signal to methyltransferase enzymes which activate or deactivate that section. Naturally, some of the sections that are switched off by methyltransferase are involved in various processes of aging.

Epigenetic testing looks for these methylation markers to determine your biological age. Several epigenetic “clocks” have been developed that examine a variety of different methylation markers across your DNA. Most notable among these are the clocks published in 2013 by biostatisticians Dr. Greg Hannum and Dr. Steve Hovarth.

Some research has shown that resistance exercise, i.e. lifting heavy stuff, in combination with endurance training, can improve several key epigenetic markers associated with aging, such as diabetes-related signaling pathways, inflammatory and glucose homeostasis, inflammatory markers in sports performance, and blood vessel development.