When I last wrote about the research I did on aging and exercise (Blog #4, March 23, 2020), I focused on one of the major ways biologists can tell where a person is in the aging process: the epigenetic clock. I described a process called DNA methylation, signals that tell certain genes to whether to become active or not.

Katy Weinberg was 25 in 2006, a Peace Corps volunteer in Zambia teaching HIV awareness and prevention, when she stumbled upon what would become the backbone of her current project: recruiting and training artists, especially musicians, to get vital public health messages out to the public.

Okay, fess up. Are you sitting around just waiting for COVID-19 to go away? Chances are we all are losing fitness by the day, and that we are all sitting even more than we usually do, which is bad enough, as I discuss in my new book Exercise is Medicine.

A couple of weeks ago, before we got seriously distracted by COVID-19, I wrote in this blog about new research that scientists in Europe, the United States, and beyond have done to pin down the exact mechanisms associated with aging.

Okay, folks. It’s exercise-and-coronavirus time

To be honest, I was going to write about something totally different today.

But since we’re all cooped up for the foreseeable future and since our bodies (and minds) still need exercise, herewith some thoughts on how to get at least the minimum (30 minutes a day, five days a week) to keep from falling apart during this difficult time.

Here’s something to ponder: From an evolutionary biology point of view, is aging just one big accident?

For most of us, aging feels inevitable, a more or less guaranteed downhill slide that we sometimes dread even more than death itself.

But one of the most fascinating things I discovered in the course of writing my new book on aging and exercise (Exercise is Medicine: How Physical Activity Boosts Health and Slows Aging) is that human aging is actually a kind of accident.

“If you run a young pig on a treadmill, the bones get bigger,” says Mark Hamrick, Ph.D., a muscle and bone researcher from Georgia. “But not an old pig.” And what’s true for pigs, alas, is true for humans as well.

It’s not just that physical activity is good for you. It’s that a sedentary lifestyle, as a totally separate variable, is seriously bad. [i] [ii] [iii] [iv] [v] [vi] 

Sitting too much – all by itself – can raise the risk of disease and premature mortality, even if you dutifully exercise.[vii]In fact, many well-educated people do exercise; but they’re also more likely to have desk jobs.[viii]

You’ve probably seen the dramatic photo of the Ohio couple slouched, overdosed, and passed out in the front seats of a car, with a little kid sitting in the back seat.  (View the video here)

Even if you haven’t seen that picture, images and words of America’s opioid overdose epidemic have captured headlines and TV news feeds for the last several years.