Saw a discussion of this on youtube. Master athletes have longer telomeres than age-matched non-athletes. A systematic review, meta-analysis and discussion of possible mechanisms - ScienceDirect I did a small literature review just through google. It seems there is some evidence of exercise in general decreasing the aging effects of telomere length shortening due to aging and eventually cell loss. The evidence seems to be more mixed for resistance training. I suppose the good news is BBM typically has HIIT in their templates which was a factor in halting telomere shortening. . The study that got a lot of attention for saying resistance training doesn’t help used a circuit training with 8 machines where there was a seated chest press, leg press, and lat pull downs but I couldn’t find out much else was in there. It didn’t seem to cover the type of resistance training BBM uses. I did find a paper showing the telomere length wasn’t shortened in power lifters with 8 +/- 3 years training. I just wondered if you guys had any thoughts on this. As an economist, I thought the data results raised interesting questions but needed a bit more study to really determine the links. Then again I am not really as versed in more medical study methodologies.
We tend to focus more on real-world / “hard” outcomes (like disease morbidity or mortality) whenever possible, rather than proxy measures or surrogate outcomes. As a result, we don’t tend to pay much attention to this sort of research on exercise as it relates to telomere length when we already have ample evidence on the benefits of any / all forms of exercise on numerous other outcomes.
1 Like