5 Healthy Ways To Slow Down The Ageing Process

Forget the number that adorned your birthday card this year, your biological age is a far better predictor of physical and cognitive functioning and even facial ageing. You might be 20, 30 or 40 but that number doesn’t determine how healthy your body is and how it’s ageing, your biological age does. And whilst a lot of how you age biologically comes down to your genes, a huge part is how you’ve treated your body. Two big factors that contribute to your biological age are smoking and obesity, and if you are in the bracket of either your biological age may well be higher than your chronological age. Quitting smoking and losing weight will be vital to helping you to slow the ageing process.

30 is a huge birthday milestone but it’s also a major ageing milestone because that’s the age when your body starts to lose muscle. In fact, from the ages of 30-80 you could lose up to 50% of muscle mass. That’s a huge amount of muscle to lose and it’ll impact hugely on how you age biologically because muscle burns more calories (so less muscle means you’ll be more likely to put on weight) and it also means you won’t have the strength that you used to have to perform everyday tasks. Counteract this natural loss of muscle mass with a strength training programme to build new muscle and keep you feeling young.

Stress can weaken immunity, and make you more susceptible to all kinds of illnesses and diseases, which can be incredibly ageing for your body and also your mental and emotional wellbeing. People tend to think of stress relieving exercise as anything calm, so things like Tai Chi or yoga, but you can actually get stress relief from any type of exercise at all. Exercise releases feel good chemicals like serotonin and endorphins into your system, helping you to feel better and manage stress more effectively. So, if yoga isn’t your thing, give another type of exercise a try, minimise the impact stress has on you, and slow the ageing process.

If you were able to see right into your heart, what would you see? You’d see thickening walls, hardening arteries and a heart having to work harder than ever just to keep your blood pumping. Sadly, we can’t see the state our hearts are in as we age, and often the only indication that something is wrong is high blood pressure, or potentially heart disease and stroke. Do you heart a favour and avoid it ageing prematurely by committing not only to exercise, but to regular exercise. Your maximum heart rate decreases as you age so cardiovascular exercise is particularly beneficial. Aim to train 3-4 times a week.