Exercise not only appears to keep skin younger, it may also even reverse skin aging in people who start exercising late in life. Many people know from their own experience that their skin will change when they’re getting older. Your skin will start the process of aging after your 40th. This means that the skin condition of the final protective outer layer of your skin will get thicker. This results in wrinkles, crow’s feet, sagging and your skin will also get drier, flakier and denser.
Research has shown that exercise influences the process of aging in mice. The mice who had the chance to do exercise have shown that their fur hasn’t turned into a gray color compared to the mice who didn’t have the chance to do exercise.
This experiment with the mice caused another test. Scientists gathered 29 local volunteers, male and female between the age of 20 to 84. As result they found out that about half of the participants were performing at least three hours of physical activity every week. They wanted to examine skin that had not been frequently exposed to the sun so they asked each volunteer to uncover their underbody.
skin samples from each volunteer were compared strictly by age. The skin samples are overall focused on what they expected and the older volunteers generally had a thicker outer layer and significantly thinner inner layers of skin.
Researcher found out that after age 40, men and women, who exercised frequently had a thicker dermis layers in their skin and thinner and healthier stratum corneums. Their skin was much closer in compared to that of the 20- and 30-year-olds than to the skin of the others of their age, even if they were past age 65.
Researchers also realized other factors, including diet, genes and lifestyles, that might have influenced the differences in skin condition between the exercising and inactive groups.
After this reseachers set a group of inactive volunteers to exercising, after collecting skin samples from their buttocks. These volunteers were 65 or older. They began a training program for three months, were they had to work out twice a week to reach at least 65 percent of their maximum aerobic capacity for 30 minutes. As result, the samples looked quite different. Their outer and inner layers looked very similar to those of 20 to 40 year olds.
How exercise changes the skin structure is not completely clear, researchers checked for alterations in the levels of certain substances created by working muscles. These muscles are called myokines and these substances are known to enter the bloodstream and jump-start changes in cells far from the muscles themselves.
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