I enjoyed a recent cover of Time magazine, on the cover of 12 to 19 September edition, headlined “The exercise cure”.  We all know about the benefits of exercise, but this was yet another article taking this further and as they say it is the surprising science of a life changing workout.  The bottom line, for those of you who have not read the article, is that we need to do at least 150 minutes of moderate intense aerobic physical activity each week and do muscle strengthening with weights or bands at least twice a week.  Aerobic exercise alone is not good enough – you need weight training, although that does not have to be with weights, you can do it with resistance bands as well.  Weights basically make muscles grow and the growth of those muscles put pressure on the bones, increasing the density of the bones and so it is absolutely crucial to do weights if you want stronger bones as you get older.  

The rest of the article basically went on to say that essentially doctors should often prescribe, instead of actual antibiotics, exercise and tell people what specific exercise they should use.  Again, with experiments on mice who are sedentary and basically don’t do much exercise, had their muscles shrivel earlier, their hearts weakened, their skin thinned, their hearing worsened and they lost their hair much faster than mice that exercised.  The research again indicates what previous research has, that exercise appears to slow aging at a cellular level.  They also proved that if somebody did 10 minutes of intense workout they could get the same improvements in heart functioning and blood sugar control as a 50 minute workout and so, and it is something I always believed in, they basically said that if you are willing to push hard, which I always describe as hurting yourself, you can get away with surprisingly little exercise.  If you want to take things more slowly and enjoy your exercise, then you would obviously need a little bit more.