Tag: aging

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Cardio exercise gets more blood to the aging brain

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My new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Also check out my new book, THE EXPLORER'S GENE: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, published in March 2025.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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We’ve been told repeatedly in recent years that exercise is good for the aging brain. An interesting new study, due to appear in next week’s issue of the American Journal of Neuroradiology, offers a clear picture (literally) of why that is. Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill took brain images (magnetic resonance angiographs, to be precise) of two groups of seniors — one group consistently exercised at least three hours a week, the other reported less than 90 minutes of any type of physical activity weekly:

Aerobically active subjects exhibited more small-diameter [blood] vessels with less tortuosity, or twisting, than the less active group, exhibiting a vessel pattern similar to younger adults…

The brain’s blood vessels naturally narrow and become more tortuous with advancing age, but the study showed the cerebrovascular patterns of active patients appeared “younger” than those of relatively inactive subjects.

It’s a pretty small study (14 subjects), and it’s always worth asking whether there are other underlying factors that could explain both the higher activity levels AND the better blood vessels in one group. Still, the link between aerobic exercise and nice big blood vessels seems pretty logical. Next step: take some sedentary seniors, get them to start exercising, and see if the blood vessels in their brains get bigger.

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Exercise decline and aging: chickens and eggs

THANK YOU FOR VISITING SWEATSCIENCE.COM!

My new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Also check out my new book, THE EXPLORER'S GENE: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, published in March 2025.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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I just noticed a new paper in the Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology by University of Ottawa prof Bradley Young and his collaborators, who have produced a series of interesting studies on masters athletes. In this case, they were looking at the lifetime training of competitive 10-kilometre runners between the ages of 40-59, exploring the following idea:

Researchers have contended that patterns of age-related decline are not necessarily due to age, but rather to disuse, or declining practice.

In other words, everyone knows we get slower (and weaker and feebler and so on) as we get older. But how much of this is directly due to aging, and how much is simply because we’re less active than we were in our salad days? Continue reading “Exercise decline and aging: chickens and eggs”

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Getting older…

THANK YOU FOR VISITING SWEATSCIENCE.COM!

My new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Also check out my new book, THE EXPLORER'S GENE: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, published in March 2025.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

***

We all are, obviously. These days, whenever I finish a workout that really wipes me out, I wonder whether I’m experiencing age-related decline, or whether I just had a good workout. I wrote about some of the ways we should change our exercise routines as we get older in a Jockology column last fall. But I didn’t have a lot of room to go into detail about the physiology underlying age-related decline — or some of the more subtle factors that affect us. For those who are interested, there’s a fantastic series on exercise and aging currently in progress at The Science of Sport, which is a site run by two sports scientists who trained with the legendary Tim Noakes in South Africa.

Two parts of the series have come out: the first is a general introduction to the topic, while the second goes over the basic physiology related to exercise and aging. A teaser: they begin by presenting the graph showing the best marathon performances for every age from teenagers to nonagenarians.

The Science of Sport's marathon vs. age graph
The Science of Sport's marathon vs. age graph

So that tells us the rate at which our performance will decline with age, right? Wrong — and that’s the whole point of their series:

However, in this case, that predicted decline is based on perhaps 50 DIFFERENT INDIVIDUALS, and you’d be completely incorrect to assume that age causes a decline in performance that is predicted by the equation X. It doesn’t work that way.

Definitely worth a read…