Hidden Benefits of Exercise

Alright,

I think everyone knows that when you exercise you can loose weight and your heart gets more in shape (mostly by increasing your stroke volume), but there are things that happen even beyond this. I was reading up on the subject and wanted to share some cool things.

Let's start with the muscles, shall we.

When you exercise, the muscles can break down (that is why you are sore), but they they actually increase in the end. Mostly it is by increasing the slow twitch muscles. These help with overall strength (and not the fast twitch ones that are instrumental for the sprinters). When you are using the muscles over and over, the capillaries around the muscle actually grow so there is more oxygen sent to the muscles. This sounds pretty crazy, but great. In the muscle cells, the mitochondria, which is responsible for most of the cells energy, will increase in number so you can have more energy at the cellular level. The muscle cells can also store more glycogen (glucose in the storage form) and they can utilize fat much better. This is all pretty great. In a nutshell, muscles have more energy available to them, and they can use all more easily.

On to the heart.

Like I said before, there is an increase in stroke volume, which is why your heart rate goes down. This makes the heart more efficient. I always wanted my heart rate below 60 because I felt that would be a good number. Let me check it right now. Hold on... okay right now it is 74, but I just had my morning coffee. Still not bad. Exercise can also decrease your blood pressure modestly. This is a little bit more medical, but it can help with coronary artery disease (why you get heart bypass surgery), by both making the vessels larger and protect the vessels from getting smutz in them.

The lungs, well not too much. More blood vessels will come to the lungs so you can extract more oxygen, but that is about it (sorry to disappoint).

Immune system.

Exercising moderately actually boosts your immune system. It seems to improve the function of most of the immune cells (B-cells, T-Cells, NK cells and macrophages). This is for moderate exercise. Once you get extreme, your immune system goes down. Working at a pediatrician's office gives me lots of opportunity to get sick, so any extra help I get is a bonus.

There is also some hormonal stuff that gets better but it is too complicated to write, so lets just say it helps.

Lastly, and in my opinion, the most interesting is that exercise extends the telomere length of cells. Well maybe not extends, but people who exercise tend to have longer telomere's that comparred to others. What is the big deal with telomere's anyway, right? Well, they are at the ends of every DNA and usually consist of some pattern and they are just there to protect the goods in the middle. When we age, they usually start to get cut off and then once they are gone the real damage can happen to the cells. In my opinion, I want the longest telomere's possible, and if exercise is going to help, so be it.

Those are the most direct benefits. Of course, there are life changes that occur (less depression, less obesity, less cancers), but not as basic as listed above.

These are all really great things to have happen to your body and totally worth the effort. Hope you enjoy these facts, and if you don't understand them, let me know.