Exercise Keeps You Young!

Don’t waste your time dropping big bucks on plastic surgery, hair plugs, chemical peels or bathing in the blood of virgins; recent research shows that a little exercise can go a long way in your personal war on aging.

Gretchen Reynolds’s article in the New York Times (titled Can Exercise Keep You Young?), chronicles a study done by Dr. Mark Tarnopolsky of McMaster University in Canada. Mice that were genetically mutated to age at an accelerated rate were split into two groups—physically active vs. sedentary—and compared to one another over a number of months.

Even though you can probably guess the results of this experiment, they’re actually more extreme than you might expect. The sedentary mice aged rapidly without fail and were all dead within one year. Not only did the physically active mice continue to keep on keepin’ on past the one year mark, they didn’t even show the signs of aging that they had been genetically mutated to acquire at the accelerated rate. The exercise proved to have unbelievably positive physical effects both inside and out (including but not limited to full, dark fur, non-shriveled ovaries and “robust” gonads!).

(For the much more complete and sciencey explanation, check out the article.)

So stop panicking and start pumping that iron! Or doing yoga! Or taking Jazzercise classes! Or even just going for a short walk to start. Soon enough you’ll be running marathons with the best of ’em, and you’ll look like that million bucks you saved on Botox.

René Cousineau was born and raised in Glenwood Springs, CO. She currently lives in Boulder and is a student of fiction writing and Russian literature. She spends her time reading, cleaning, hiking, dancing, and slinging cupcakes at a local bakery/coffee shop.