Exercise is still the best medicine | Keep Women Healthy
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Exercise is still the best medicine
You can slow down the aging process with as little as 15 minutes a day of moderate activity.
Regular exercise may be able to offset disease-causing cellular damage and slow the aging process.
“We’re doing all these great things to keep people living longer, but when people hit their 70s and 80s, they’re more likely to have many chronic diseases, not just heart disease,” says Dr. Daniel Forman, who just moved from Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital to head the Section on Geriatric Cardiology at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.
Aging takes place on the cellular level as a result of inflammation and oxidative stress. As cell damage accumulates, your metabolism changes, you gain fat, and you lose muscle mass, all of which make you more vulnerable to disease. “Being sedentary essentially ratchets up the process,” says Dr. Forman.
Quantifying the value of exercise
In a nutshell, the more exercise you get, the better off you will be, as long as you don’t hurt yourself. That said, any physical activity is better than being sedentary. Exercise has a cumulative benefit. Over 30 years, people who exercise regularly have very different outcomes than people who give it upafter 10 years, Dr. Forman emphasizes.
Changing your body’s function
“It changes the whole notion of exercise, from the idea of pushing yourself to your limits, to the concept of doing anything that moves your body. The endpoint is not to make your muscles bigger, but to really change the way your body functions,” says Dr. Forman.
While you can’t completely stop aging, staying active can slow down the destructive processes that lead to disease and immobility, which diminish your quality of life. “Most of my patients are very concerned about frailty,” says Dr. Forman. “But in many ways, frailty is an iteration of aging gone bad—blurring into disease patterns. Your commitment to walking regularly makes a big difference to your overall health as well as your prognosis. It affects other attributes, such as cognition and mood, which combine to make a huge difference in how well you live, not just how long you live.” 
Calculating your lifetime fitness riskYou can estimate your 30-year cardiovascular risk using the online Lifetime Risk calculator tool (www.lifetimerisk.org). To perform the calculation, you will need basic information on your medical history and cardiac risk factors. You will also be asked for your metabolic equivalent (MET) score on a treadmill exercise test or other measured fitness assessment.
Source: https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/exercise-is-still-the-best-medicine