The next Science on Tap offers attendees a sip from the Fountain of Youth, unmasking how exercise is the secret to keeping the body younger and healthier.

The lecture will be conducted by professor of kinesiology and health studies Robert Kraemer at Tope La Catering, 113 East Thomas St., in Hammond. The lecture is scheduled on Tuesday, November 3 for 7:00 p.m. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. The presentation is free and open to all ages.

The main topics covered will be how physical activity can slow or reverse changes that occur within the human body with aging, inner tissue signaling and its relationship with exercise, how the endocrine system is involved in signaling and the different types of exercise out there.

“A lot of times when I’m teaching exercise science to my undergraduates, I talk to them about different concepts in class, and a lot of the things I talk about are related to taking the situation when someone has body function that is going downhill and reversing it,” said Kraemer. “There are a lot of similarities with this and aging. Over the last 20 years, there has been a lot of studies that have shown where aging is stopped or reversed with physical activity.”

In addition to maximum oxygen uptake being a big measurement of respiratory fitness, having a healthy maximum oxygen uptake, normally obtained through exercise, can correlate with decreasing aging effects.

“For years, I would talk about how people, across their lifespan, if they don’t exercise, there is a significant drop in maximum oxygen uptake, the ability for the heart to move oxygen to the tissues and the ability for the oxygen to be used by the tissues,” said Kraemer. “It declines with age with people who exercise, but not as much as people who don’t exercise at all. The people who exercise don’t age as much.”

Exercise has many physical benefits, such as improving health, physical characteristics involving the muscles and skin and in rehabilitation for injuries, but it can also improve cognitive function in the brain.

According to Kraemer, there is evidence that exercise helps prevent cognitive decline both in healthy individuals and those with certain diseases, such as Alzheimer’s.

One of Kraemer’s areas of study is tissue signaling. This is when the tissues in the body, which are a mass of cells that have the same function, signal to either the brain or other different tissues. Movement from exercise increases this signaling, which promotes a response to increase function in multiple areas of the body.

“You have these signals that are sent from muscle tissue to your brain or from muscle tissue to fat tissue,” said Kraemer. “Those signals are to make things work better or to make the tissues function better. If there is muscle damage during exercise, it can be repaired properly. There are signals to the immune system, signals to satellite cells to come in and repair the tissue. We are now finding that there are different kinds of signaling that goes on when we exercise that goes to our brains, stimulating our brains to make new nerve cells. It’s really like science fiction. All these little cells sending communication signals, helping them function better. If we sit, then, none of this communication is going on, and there isn’t changes to keep making these proteins for muscles, maintaining bone mass or improving brain function or liver function.”

These tissue signals are the initial response to exercise, which causes changes in the internal environment of the body, such as dilating blood vessels, increasing metabolism and creating more protein for muscle building. If an individual engages in chronic exercise, over time these responses by the body will add up over time to form subtle adaptations. An example of this is the heart’s ventricles getting longer and being able to hold more blood, the fibers in skeletal muscles getting bigger and being able to contract more forcefully or the nerve cells being able to respond better.

“With one bout of exercise, it creates these signals to respond and improve metabolism so that we break down more fuel and repair muscle tissue that has been damaged and make it bigger,” said Kraemer. “We make sure the heart is getting more of what it needs so it can respond better. Over time, as these signals occur, these adaptations occur so that you have the heart remodeled in a good way so it can pump more forcefully or that skeletal muscle can contract and produce more force. Or, there is more bone mass that can withstand a stress of weight-bearing exercise. Or, the brain can send better signals, and so on.”

Even though some may think exercise is not for them, Kraemer believes there are many alternatives for people other than the well-known workouts such as weightlifting and running training. A couple of these alternatives include yoga or active video games, such as Wii Zumba.

“We have a lot of different forms of exercise,” said Kraemer. “A lot of people have a negative view on exercise because of a bad experience with it. They have a bad exercise memory, but there are all different kinds of exercise people can do that they should try. It will allow them to take a sip from the Fountain of Youth.”