Telomeres are your tiny body clocks

Inside your body are tiny “countdown clocks” that determine how long you’ll live.

• enhancing your speed and power
• keeping the stamina to go all day long
• boosting your natural defenses against infections and aging.

This is very important to people who are over 50 but it is also important if you’re in your 30s and 40s, too. Because it involves restoring and protecting your DNA, the building block of every cell in your body.

At the end of each strand of DNA is a little bit of genetic material called a telomere. The length of these telomeres determines how old or young a cell acts.

As your cells divide, the telomeres get shorter, and this is where the genetic countdown begins.

Over time, your body produces cells that are older and weaker when you copy DNA with shorter telomeres. This is kind of like making copies on your copy machine. If you keep copying a copy from a copy, it becomes more and more distorted.

Studies now show that the shorter your telomeres are, the “older” your body is, regardless of your actual age.1

• One study published this month looked at 1,136 people, and followed them for six years. They found that people with the shortest telomeres - no matter their age, sex or race – were 60% more likely to die earlier than those with the longest telomeres.2
• In two separate European studies on twins, the twin with the shorter telomeres was more likely to die first. The latest study says three times as likely.3
• Another study published by Oxford University followed over 3,000 healthy men and women for 10 years. People who were in “excellent” or “very good” health had significantly longer telomeres than people who were only in “fair” or “poor” health.4

With our new product, Telezyme, you may find the best way for you to support, maintain, or even lengthen your telomeres.

There is also something that you can start doing today to help keep your telomeres from shortening. This will let you keep doing more, and stay active and independent throughout your lifetime. Regular vigorous exercise!

Recently a study of 2,401 twins found that physical activity was related to telomere length. Moderate levels of activity created much longer telomeres than either zero exercise or too much exercise.

People got to choose the kind of exercise they liked to do. They did things like running, swimming or tennis. Those who exercised moderately had telomeres that looked five or six years younger. Those who exercised vigorously had telomeres that looked nine years younger.5

Researchers in Germany found that intense exercise keeps your cardiovascular system from aging by preventing shortening of telomeres.6

And in a study done at the University of California in San Francisco, people who exercised vigorously had lower levels of perceived stress and were likelier to have longer telomeres.7

The problem with aerobics and traditional “cardio” is that they are not vigorous workouts. They are “moderate-intensity” workouts.

Sure, you might run for a long time, but duration doesn’t equal intensity. When you jog, you do it at low or medium power, which doesn’t help slow telomere loss.

What you want to do instead is exercise using the principles of a PACE program.

PACE stands for “progressively accelerating cardiopulmonary exertion” and it gradually challenges your heart, lungs, and blood vessels to build their strength. It involves doing short bursts of exercise with a resting phase between each burst much as you would if you were predator or prey. “In the wild creatures must be able to accelerate to 100 percent capacity in a single heartbeat. Humans have lost this ability to accelerate somewhat recently.” This makes perfect sense since the fact is fact that if you constantly exercise at a certain level your heart adjusts to that level and it is no longer increasing the capacity of your heart, lungs and blood vessels.

PACE makes an exciting, vigorous workout accessible to anyone, regardless of your current condition. You can start out walking if that’s all you can do!

PACE helps you by boosting the amount of exercise incrementally, challenging your body to grow stronger. You control your progression, and you can alter the type of workouts you do to keep it fun and interesting.

In fact, here’s an example of a workout using this system you can do right now:

a. Lie down on your stomach and stretch your arms in front of you.
b. Raise arms and legs off the floor and sweep your arms back to your thighs.
c. Return arms to starting position and repeat.

When you’re ready, try 100 repetitions while timing yourself. It doesn’t matter how long it takes. Take your time. Rest if you need to. But continue until you’ve done 100 repetitions.

During your next PACE session, time yourself again and shoot for doing them a little faster, or, in taking the same amount of time, adding more reps before your breaks. To make it tougher, you can hold a ball between your feet.

And that’s the key to PACE – aim to progressively accelerate the intensity of the exertion, NOT the duration. You should never exert yourself for more than a total of 12 minutes. More exertion in a shorter amount of time is the key to longer telomeres.

alsearsmd.com