Study identifies best exercise to reverse signs of aging

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You already know working out regularly can help keep you slim, boost your mood, aid your sleep, and even stave off disease. But a new study has identified a potential mode of exercise that may help optimize the reversal of any unwanted signs of aging — high-intensity interval training (HIIT).

The idea is that instead of long, steady movement (think: running several miles on a treadmill at the same speed and incline), alternating between quick spurts of intense, all-out exercise and lower-intensity exercise during HIIT can help raise your heart rate and enable you to shed more fat, faster.

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In the new study, published Tuesday in Cell Metabolism, researchers found HIIT in aerobic exercises like biking and walking revved cells’ ability to generate more proteins within mitochondria and their protein-building ribosomes — essentially stunting aging at a cellular level.

"Based on everything we know, there's no substitute for these exercise programs when it comes to delaying the aging process," senior study author Sreekumaran Nair, a medical doctor and diabetes researcher at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, said in a news release. "These things we are seeing cannot be done by any medicine."

Researchers enrolled 36 men and 36 women from a younger group (ages 18 to 30) and an older group (ages 65 to 80). Each group received a different exercise assignment: either high-intensity interval biking, strength training with weights, or a regimen that combined strength training and HIIT.

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Next, they biopsied participants’ thigh muscles and compared their molecular makeup against those of sedentary volunteers’. They also analyzed the participants’ lean muscle mass and insulin sensitivity, which is a marker for type 2 diabetes.

They found strength training aided muscle building, but the younger group that did HIIT saw a 49 percent increase in mitochondrial capacity and the older group saw a 69 percent increase. HIIT also helped reduce insulin sensitivity.

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The one thing HIIT wasn’t good for? Building muscle. That’s why a mix of HIIT and strength training may offer the most benefits, as muscle mass tends to decline with aging, Nair noted.

"If people have to pick one exercise, I would recommend high-intensity interval training,” Nair said in the release, “but I think it would be more beneficial if they could do 3-4 days of interval training and then a couple days of strength training.”