The Year in Fitness: Exercise, Add Intensity, Live to See Another Year<br />In that study, which I wrote about in March (which became my most popular column this year), scientists at the Mayo Clinic compared differences in gene expression inside muscle cells after younger<br />and older people had completed various types of workouts.<br />But in people older than 64, more than 400 genes were working differently now<br />and many of those genes are known to be related to the health and aging of cells.<br />Other studies this year reinforced the notion that age need not be a deterrent to hard exercise and that such workouts could be key to healthy aging.<br />Perhaps most striking, “the animals had tolerated the high-intensity interval training well,” one of the scientists who conducted the study told me.<br />His efforts help to belie a number of entrenched beliefs about older people, including<br />that physical performance and aerobic capacity inevitably decline with age and that intense exercise is inadvisable, if not impossible, for the elderly.<br />The greatest differences were seen in the operations of genes after people had practiced high-intensity interval training for 12 weeks.<br />After four months of this kind of training, the exercised animals were stronger<br />and more aerobically fit than other mice of the same age, and few remained physically frail.
