16 July 2023 , 20:52
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A leading doctor has pin-pointed the one type of exercise we should all be doing to keep ourselves fit - and says he regrets not taking it up years ago.
Dr Daniel Lieberman, a Harvard University professor specialising in human evolutionary biology, recently appeared on Steven Bartlett's popular podcast Diary of a CEO to talk health.
The medic says that he'd always been into walking and running in order to stay in shape, but hadn't considered weight training until much more recently. He regrets not starting sooner and urged listeners to delve deeper into the exercise they do.
Dr Lieberman explained during the episode that we all should be doing regular weight exercise to keep our bodies in good shape - especially as we get older.
He said: "I've become more serious about doing some strength training. I've always loved walking and running and endurance activities and I've always hated doing weights, I just don't like it -I'm not a very strong person.
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"People tend to do what they like, you get reinforcement from it. The more I studied the importance of resistance training, the more I realised the importance of doing weights, especially as you age, I've started kicking myself for being lazy about that."
He now aims to do two 'good strength workouts every week'.
"Especially as you age, the loss of muscle mass can be really debilitating," he told the podcast. "As people get older they tend to lose muscle and as people do that they become frail and you lose functional capacity and that starts off a vicious cycle.
"Once that happens, you're less likely to be physically active. then your muscles waste away more, it's very debilitating.
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"Ageing is just a clock ticking on, nothing we can do about age, but senescence the way the body degrades as we get old. What physical activity does, is that it slows senescence, especially for certain organs.
"The most important myth is that as you get older it's normal to be less active and that is just not true."
The doctor also explained that our mental and physical health can take a toll when we become less active.
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And as well as this, failing to exercise often means we're more likely to become unwell.
Dr Lieberman has spent decades studying different communites from across the world because the majority of research to date has been carried out in American or European when talking about diseases.