The Best Anti-Aging Workout You Can Do

The Best Anti-Aging Workout

Doing all-out sprints for 30 seconds beat out steady cardio and longer, less-intense intervals (four minutes each at 90 percent effort) for boosting the power output of each unit of mitochondria, a new study at Victoria University in Australia found. 

The Anti-Aging Benefits of Cardio

The key to maxing the mitochondria you have all over is cardio. In fact, endurance exercise can double the amount in your muscle, says Mark Tarnopolsky, M.D., Ph.D., a professor at McMaster University in Ontario. “By swabbing athletes’ cheeks, we’ve found that they even have more mitochondria there,” he says. 

The Anti-Aging Benefits of Strength Training

“We’ve seen resistance training increase the amount of mitochondria by 30 percent in older adults who did three weight circuit workouts a week over four months,” Dr. Tarnopolsky says. So is there one optimal strength training regimen to follow? A new review of studies in the journal Frontiers in Physiology that looked at resistance exercise and its effect on the amount of mitochondria in muscle suggests more research is needed to find the single best.