http://www.thestar.com/News/article/216706

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I would post the text of the article, but I always get weird codes and stuff if I cut and paste here.

That is an interesting article -- Thanks for posting it.

Too bad more older people don't weight train.

There is already a lot of evidence that exercise changes gene expression - the whole muscle plasticity deal is predicated on that and that has been around for years.

The study at the beginning of the thread is coming out with a lot of other related work. The picture seems to be that exercise causes an increase in "reactive oxygen species", nitric oxide, etc. These act as chemical "signals" because in response to them, a bunch of other transcription events occur; interleukins 6 and 8, heme oxygenase-1, and heat shock protein-72, cyclooxygenase-2, growth-arrest-DNA-damage induced-153 increase, and heat shock protein-60 and glucose-related protein 75 decrease. People are coining the term "myokines" for the secretions of exercised muscle, and starting to regard the muscle as an endocrine organ (having a role as a gland).

Exercise doesn't just turn on and off transcription of some genes, either. It also appears that there are ways that exercise increases the speed at which these transcriptional changes take effect; this is by turning on the immediate early gene; and there are some non-protein effects due to RNA-RNA interactions.

So a whole ton of stuff occurs when you exercise, (which is not surprising, the human body is incredibly complex and a whole ton of stuff occurs all the time anyway).

The interesting thing about these changes is that they almost all seem to have good systemic outcomes. There are some systemic "downsides" due to exercise though, such as you can wear out your joints, but so far as I can tell the upsides outweigh the downsides.