TORONTO — If you want a taste of the Fountain of Youth, try pumping iron.
That's the message that emerges from a new Canadian study that shows that resistance training actually reverses aging — at least in muscle tissue.
"With a little weight training we managed, to a certain extent, to turn back the hands of time," Mark Tarnopolsky, director of the neuromuscular and neurometabolic clinic at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and co-author of the study, said in an interview.
"Resistance training reversed the effects of aging in skeletal muscles," he said.
Participants in the research project, who lifted light weights for a mere two hours a week, were able to improve their muscle strength by 50 percent during the six-month study period.
Researchers, however, did not merely measure muscle strength in the traditional sense of the term.
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Rather, they measured the gene expression of muscles — more specifically, how many mitochondria they produce.
Mitochondria are tiny biochemical power plants in cells that convert food into energy, and tiny changes in mitochondrial DNA have been pegged as the key component of aging.
"The reason we get weaker, thinner and have less endurance as we age is that there are fewer genes making mitochondria," Tarnopolsky said.
