Most people know that exercise improves cognitive function, bone density, cardiovascular and muscle strength, but are you aware that recent studies have shown that exercise doesn’t just make you look younger and empower your body, exercise (particularly intense exercise) makes you younger on a cellular level?
By turning off the ageing process in your chromosomes.
In order to stay young, you have to keep your cells young. Researchers have found that exercise can keep DNA healthy and young.
Telomeres, the caps at the end of our chromosomes that are responsible for ageing, get shorter as we get older. Recent studies have shown a link between regular exercise and lengthening of the telomeres, which suggests that exercise may literally be able to slow our clocks down and help us live longer.
But that’s not all, there are studies (that may be related to the above) that show exercise could also increase cell autophagy, which is the cellular repair system. This is very important and in truth, ageing is simply the lack of repair to various cell features.
So, if exercise has now been proven to make your cells grow younger could this be linked to some of the ancient forms of exercise that are said to achieve longevity?
Picture yourself sitting in a meditation posture. You still yourself inside and start to focus on your breath. As your breathing continues naturally you start to imagine the breath coming into a set of your muscles, let’s choose the forearms. As this happens you focus your mind and tune into the muscles and tense every single muscle with great energy. You imagine that as you breathe in you bring great health, power and strength into every single cell of the muscle. You repeat this with every breath for many repetitions and move to the next muscle.
You practice this every day and as the day becomes, weeks and years become months and years you start to be able to tense and energise every single cell of each muscle. In time you can even “feel” and stimulate organs and even the bone marrow with this method of meditation/exercise.
Im not describing something new here, it’s actually a legendary Chinese exercise called Yi Jing or Sinew Transformation. Does it sound like it could possibly stimulate the health benefits modern science has discovered? Do you think it could amplify them?
Legend said that Yi Jin Jing was created by the founder of Zen Buddhism, Bodhidharma who after noticing the monks at the Shaolin Monastery were getting ill and dying young from their lifestyle of constant meditation and rejection of the body.
It’s largely believed that practising this exercise can not only lead to great strength but also longevity or even immortality. Legends are told of people who within months of taking up this art became up to 10 years younger and their hair even grew back to its natural colour.
Seems science is finding the evidence to prove the power of these ancient methods.
To learn the genuine Yi Jin Jing please check out my book on the subject
