A new article in Outside Magazine discusses the critical importance of exercise on the health of our mitochondria. I enjoyed reading this piece and the most important takeaway is that physical training will increase the number of mitochondria and also induce mitophagy, which is the body’s process of removing aged and damaged mitochondria. This is an essential aspect of anti-aging. In addition to my personal exercise regimen, I take Urolithin A every day because of its proven abilities to increase mitochondrial health.
The article also discusses the benefits of High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT), stating the importance of this high impact, high heart rate (with short breaks) type of exercise.
Dr. David Hood, director of the Muscle Health Research Centre at York University in Toronto, Canada said, “We found that exercise expands the mitochondrial network and muscle to provide more energy. A single bout of exercise gets the process going by activating genes to transcribe proteins that will ultimately be translated into proteins that assemble mitochondria. Over the course of three or four weeks (of consistent training), you can start to have significant increases in mitochondria, but you have to train with the appropriate intensity, duration and frequency.
One of the tenets of regenerative medicine at PUR-FORM is to increase the health and numbers of our patient’s mitochondria. This article does an excellent job of stressing why exercise is a critical component of that process. In fact, the article’s last sentence shares one of my guiding philosophies about longevity: “As goes our mitochondrial health, so goes our whole-body health.”
