How much do your fitness levels contribute towards your longevity and quality of life? We find out so you can employ the new exercise sciences that’ll outwit, out run and out train disease.

 

Use it or lose it. That’s a phrase that applies to every person on this rock because you need to get moving or die trying. Stay on the couch and you may truly rest in peace. To make sure you clock up a respectable stint it’s important to figure out exactly what might impede a smooth transition into your ‘rocking-chair-days’ because it’s safe to assume that if you’ve put in the hard yards to look and perform at your best then you’ll want to be around to enjoy the fruits of your labors. After lifestyle and food choices are factored in, getting your heart rate up with regular exercise is a near vaccine-level solution for safeguarding your health and longevity.

 

Okay, so the notion that exercise is good for you could just as well come from the Ministry of The Bleeding Obvious. However, knowing what balance of training is best to safeguard your health against the diseases you’re most likely to be affected by is an emerging science that can tailor to your family history and risk factors. We uncover the answers so you can take the steps towards making your birthday cakes buckle beneath the weight of their candles.

 

How To Use Excerise To Fight Disease

  1. Putting on a united front

You might train your muscle groups in different sessions but your body works better when it pools its resources. Your immune, cardiovascular and endocrine systems team up to put up a defense system against all threats. Getting more oxygen around your body, thanks to exercise, helps all your organs and bodily systems do all their jobs more productively.

 

  1. A rush of blood

Getting your blood pumping raises your good cholesterol that shuttles around your blood to bang the excess bad cholesterol off the walls of your arteries, the faster the flow the clearer your arteries are likely to be. Your blood sugar is also important because research in the International Journal of Sports Medicine found that regular training keeps it more stable, helping you use it for all day energy that doesn’t peak and trough.

 

  1. Waste management

Exercise helps remove waste products from your body. This can happen in a variety of ways because it pushes food through your intestines faster which means any foods that aren’t as good for you might get pushed out sooner, limiting your exposure to them.

 

  1. Shoring up all lines of defense

Oddly, exercise in the short time can actually weaken your immune system because endurance athletes have lower levels of salivary IgA after races, found research in the Journal of Clinical Immunology. This is your body’s first line of antibody defense that resides in your mouth and nose. However, this seems to be a short-term dip because long-term exercise does exactly the opposite. Research in the British Journal of Sports Medicine found that people who worked out regularly for 12 weeks had fewer colds and coughs. What’s more, the symptoms were 32% less severe in the top 25% of exercisers compared to the bottom 25%. The researchers say that every time you get sweaty your immune system gets a refresher, increasing the number of white blood cells and immunoglobulin (antibodies) in your blood while reducing your stress levels which play a big factor in your ability to fend of illness.

 

  1. Look good to feel good inside and out

You’ll be able to keep a healthier body mass, which means you’re not straining your body by lugging a lot of dead weight around with you. In a nutshell, if you don’t have time for exercise you better make time to be sick because that’s what’s coming for you.

 

Flexing off the big C

The Center for Disease Control reports that while heart disease is the biggest killer of men, cancer weighs in as a frighteningly close second, affecting a staggering 24.1% of all men. While this might not be the most uplifting subject, the rise of this disease is something that affects everyone directly or indirectly because those stats mean almost one out of every four people you know is likely to get cancer.

 

Fortunately, if you want to be on the right side of that statistic and are already exercising regularly, you’re on the right rack to shrugging off this disease. Research in the British Journal of Cancer looked at the relationship that 40,708 men had with exercise and discovered that those who trained regularly were less likely to die from cancer. Men who did formal exercise for at least 30 minutes a day had a 33% better survival rate compared to those who exercised less or did nothing at all.

 

“These results show for the first time, the affect that daily exercise has in reducing cancer death risk in men aged between 45 and 79,” said professor Alicja Wolk, the study author. “We looked at more moderate exercise such as housework, undertaken over a longer period of time and found that this also reduced men’s chances of dying from the disease.” Exercising moderately has also been shown to help women fight off breast cancer, but what about the cancers that are more specific to men such as those of the prostate and what happens if you choose to do more than moderate exercise? Well, research in the journal Cancer found that people who were highly active were 53% less likely to have biopsy results that showed they had prostate cancer compared to guys were sedentary or just mildly active.

 

So, there’s no surprise that it’s important to be active, but strenuous activity like running or swimming appears to do a far better job at safeguarding your man-parts. Where does that leave strength training? It’s been already been proved to be a valuable ally in the recovery and improving of the quality of life of cancer survivors, even when slightly lighter loads were used such as 1-3 sets of 8-12 reps on several exercises, found research in the International Journal of Sports Medicine.

 

Whether or not pumping iron can prevent cancer is still up for debate, but there can be no doubt that if your gym workouts are at a high enough intensity then they’re sure to count as strenuous exercise that definitely does reduce your risk factors. In short, get sweating so that you feel exhausted afterwards and you’ll give yourself the best chance of getting the jump on cancer before it has the chance to get started.