People who exercise regular live shorter lifes

"Cardio shrinks your telomeres.

Even a couch potato who does no exercise at all may be better off from a telomere length standpoint than the folks who run marathons and spend hours on treadmills.
(about telomeres)

Why is this important to you?

Because many of today’s most widespread conditions and illnesses are associated with shorter telomeres. Telomeres are the tiny genetic “clocks” that tell your cells how old they are.

In one telomere study, people with the longest telomeres were the least likely to develop cancer. They were more than 10 times less likely to develop cancer than people with short telomeres. And when I read further into the study, I discovered that people with short telomeres are twice as likely to die from cancer.

Another study shows that the death rate for heart attacks is almost three times higher for people whose telomeres get short the fastest.

As bad as it is to have accelerated telomere loss, that’s exactly what endurance exercise does. And the studies proving it have been completely ignored by mainstream fitness “experts.”

In one, researchers followed up on the known fact that long-term, cardio-type exercise damages your muscle cells. They decided to take it a little further and examine the damaged cells. One of the things they looked at was the length of the telomeres inside these muscle cells.

Athletes with “exercise fatigue” – the athletes doing the long-duration cardio workouts – had much shorter than normal telomeres.

The title of this study, as it appeared in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, sums it up perfectly: “Athletes with exercise-associated fatigue have abnormally short muscle DNA telomeres…”

And, if that’s not enough, in another more recent study researchers compared trained athletes to “sedentary individuals.”

They looked at the telomere lengths of trained athletes doing cardio vs. coach potatoes who did no exercise at all.

The couch potatoes had longer telomeres than the endurance athletes.

In fact, the experienced runners ALL had shorter telomeres than the people doing no exercise. What’s more, the longer the runners ran, the shorter their telomeres.

Fortunately for you, we now have the ability to influence the length of these tiny genetic clocks. You can have younger-acting cells and help avoid age-related problems by maintaining your telomere length.

The most powerful way to do this is to do the opposite of what fitness experts recommend.

Instead of hours of low-power exercises like running and cardio, you can maintain the length of your telomeres with shorter periods of exertion where you challenge yourself a bit more.

You see, cardio is a low-power exercise. Think about what it’s like when you run – it’s steady plodding and pounding for a long period of time.

What you want to do instead is give your body a challenge, and do it over shorter periods of time.

For instance, one study done at the University of California in San Francisco found that vigorous exertion protects you from high stress by protecting your telomeres. And there are dozens more trials that show the same thing.

- See more at: http://www.telomerehealth.org/do-couch-p...kLtJs.dpuf

Great to know. Better stop exercising then.