Photo: Dim Gunger, Unsplash
Super-Structure! Another Wildly-Unexpected Benefit Of Exercise:
Imagine this: You’ve been hitting the gym regularly for years,
Watching and maybe hoping the numbers on the scale will slowly but surely drop.
You feel pretty great, and you know you’re doing your body a lot of good.
-Even if you don’t look like Chris Williamson just yet.
But what if I told you that your dedication to fitness is doing more than just burning calories and using muscles?
What if it’s actually changing the very nature of your body, even the non-muscular parts, making them work for you instead of against you?…
The Short Answer:
- A lot of silly ideas can get passed-around by things like word-of-mouth or movies.
- This can include silly ideas about how exercise has to go to achieve results.
- We also believed exercise did nothing besides burn calories and build muscle until very recently.
- A U. Mich team experimented with the bodyfat of 32 subjects.
- Half of them exercised and half didn’t.
- All were obese and the half that exercised went for 11 years.
- The team found the exercisers had body fat that was completely different than the couch-potatoes.
- They had fat with more blood vessels, beneficial proteins, and fewer inflammatory cells.
- This resembled a type of very healthy fat called, “BAT”.
- For some reason, the exercisers had more fat in healthier places and less in the bad areas.
- Their “special fat” was also better at storage, so that helps too.
- This suggests that aging will be healthier for exercisers even if they gain a little weight.
- Even fat grown in a lab via starter-cells taken from exercisers had all the same properties.
- One common problem this phenomenon might address is the problem of “fatty liver disease”.
- Exercise has recently shown other unexpected benefits, too.
- This study does not recommend overeating and gaining weight; it just shows that exercise can make the fat part of the body much healthier.
- The amazing change in body fat was completely-unexpected and shows just another benefit of staying active.
Read on to find out the details…
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Exercising Is Only For Burning Calories & Sweating Like Rocky, Right?:
So here’s our premise. We all have weird & silly ideas about exercise.
Like every movie training-montage has convinced you it HAS to be a Rocky-Balboa-level workout.
Or that to exercise your muscles, you have to do it in a gym with all kinds of exotic movements and equipment.
Well, another weird assumption we tend to have about exercise is that it only results in 3 things;
- Sweat
- Burned Calories
- Muscle
What if it’s way more than just that?
Freaky Results So Good, They Even Work On People Who Are Obese:
A surprising study from U. Mich. just uncovered some of those weird benefits!
–Even for people who are overweight or obese.
The research team compared the belly fat of two [yes!] obese groups:
1) 16 Dedicated gym-goers who exercised at least four times a week for an average of 11 years.
2) 16 People who had never exercised regularly but matched in sex and BMI.
The Exercisers’ Fat Tissue Is Surprisingly Supercharged!:
What they found was pretty surprising.
The exercisers’ fat tissue was structurally and biologically different from the couch potatoes’.
It had:
- More blood vessels to keep it well-nourished
- More mitochondria per unit to burn calories
- Higher levels of beneficial proteins
- Fewer cells that promote inflammation
In essence, their fat was much healthier and better equipped to do its job.
But even more than this, it shows some reduction in inflammation which is -extremely- uncommon for people with excess fat.
And two, all those changes make this fat look a lot more like the super-healthy “metabolic fat” we all have between our shoulder-blades, called, “BAT“.
Not All Fat Is Inert Or Even The Same:
Despite its bad rap, fat tissue plays some important roles in the body.
It stores energy, keeps us warm, and even produces hormones.
The freakonomics-level key is: where that fat is stored.
The jiggly stuff just under the skin, called subcutaneous, is actually the best place for extra fat to land.
It’s significantly better than visceral fat, which accumulates around the organs, or even gets stuffed into the organs themselves like the liver.
Exercise Somehow Gives Your Fat A Structural Overhaul:
That’s where the benefits of exercise come in.
By changing the structure and function of subcutaneous fat, researchers found regular physical activity seems to increase its storage capacity.
So if you do happen to gain a few pounds over the years (which is almost inevitable),
That weight is more likely to be tucked away safely in the safest place for it,
Rather than stuck around your heart or clogging up your liver, which is another problem called, “Fatty Liver Disease”.
Even In A Second Test, The Fat Cells Seemed To Be Different:
The researchers even took their investigation a step further,
By growing separate fat tissue in their lab from cells collected from both of the obese subject groups.
Somehow, the cells from the exercisers also developed into tissue that was better at storing fat!!
It’s like exercise was giving the cells themselves a crash course in fat management,
-Which they could replicate at any time! And that suggests there might be a wide-scale possibly-permanent nature to the changes.
Fat Storage Freakiness Is Just Another Amazing Benefit Of Exercise:
Even as this study shows some pretty unexpected results that seem to apply to everyone,
And also that exercise may help people avoid Fatty-Liver Disease.
It joins a list of other studies showing some pretty freaky results from exercise as well:
1) Weightlifting jump-starts zombie-cell cleanup
2) People with higher lean body mass are less likely to get Alzheimer’s
3) Exercise releases powerful anti-inflammatories
4) Running & cardio clean out your brain
-And many other freakonomics-type benefits.
Another important thing to note is this study’s tone may be misleading and that it’s not encouraging anyone to get fat or obese,
It’s more about some of the healthy dynamics that exercise can create, not about overeating.
Good News! -Every Workout Counts Whether You Can See It Or Not!:
Of course, this current piece of work is just the beginning.
The researchers plan to conduct long-term studies tracking people as they start and stick with exercise programs,
Exploring how different types and intensities of physical activity affect fat tissue.
They also want to look further into how lab-grown fat from exercisers might help other people, like non-exercisers.
But one thing is clear: The benefits of exercise go way beyond what we can see in the mirror.
It’s just one more reason to lace up those sneakers and get moving. Your whole body will thank you – even if your skinny jeans occasionally protest.
References & Links:
• Source: U.Mich.
• Source Study: NatureMet. – Years of endurance exercise training remodel abdominal subcutaneous adipose tissue in adults with overweight or obesity
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