Exercise Reverses Skin’s Aging Process, Study Finds
Almost everyone obsesses about wrinkles, but what can you do short of staying out of the sun or pumping your face full of chemicals? The answer may be as simple as a jog around the park.
In a small study, researchers at McMaster University in Ontario found that exercise may not only keep skin younger, but may also reverse skin aging, even in people who take up exercise later in life, according to The New York Times.
Earlier studies at McMaster examined the affect of exercise on mice. Researchers split mice into two groups, giving one group access to exercise wheels. The mice that didn’t exercise quickly became weak, bald and ill while the mice that exercised regularly enjoyed healthy brains, hearts, muscles and reproductive organs. In addition, they kept their fur longer — and it didn’t even go gray.
The researchers wondered if exercise could have the same impact on people, so they performed a second test, presented this month at The American Medical Society for Sports Medicine, that involved 29 male and female volunteers ages 20 to 84.
About half of the participants completed at least three hours of moderate or vigorous physical activity every week, while the others were mostly sedentary, exercising for less than an hour a week. Then the researchers asked each volunteer to uncover a buttock because they wanted to look at skin that’s rarely exposed to the sun.
The researchers found that, after age 40, those who had been active had visibly younger looking skin, similar to that of someone in their 20s or 30s, even if the participant was over the age of 65.