Can You Combat Wrinkles With Exercise?

Forget Botox, plastic surgery, and anti-aging creams. The latest research shows that a surprising, low-cost natural alternative beats those approaches when it comes to reversing wrinkles and skin aging.

The miracle alternative: Exercise.

A recent study has found people who start exercising later in life can reverse facial wrinkles, crow’s feet, and areas of sagging skin – and there’s a scientific explanation for why, The New York Times reports.

Researchers at McMaster University in Ontario found that exercise appears to combat changes in the outer layers of skin that come with advancing age.

After about age 40, most people experience a thickening of in the top outer layer of skin – called the stratum corneum -- the portion of the skin most visible to the eye. It tends to become drier, flakier, and denser with age.

Meanwhile, the layer of skin just below the surface – known as the dermis – begins to thin, as we age, losing cells and elasticity. This gives the skin a more translucent and often saggier appearance, the researchers explain.

This occurs even in people without any skin damage from the sun.

But the new McMaster University research found that that regular exercise can ward off and even reverse these changes in animals and people.

In preliminary studies, the McMaster scientists found mice given access to running wheels experienced few age-related changes in the animals’ outer layers -- in addition to maintaining healthier brains, hearts, muscles, and reproductive organs.

To see if the same trends held true in people, the researchers enlisted 29 men and women volunteers, ages 20 to 84, and assigned them different levels of exercise.

About half of the participants were asked to engage in at least three hours of moderate or vigorous physical activity every week, while the others were sedentary -- exercising for less than an hour per week.

Over the course of the months-long study, the scientists biopsied skin samples from each volunteer’s waist area and examined them microscopically.

“We wanted to examine skin that had not been frequently exposed to the sun,” said Dr. Mark Tarnopolsky, a McMaster professor of pediatrics and exercise who oversaw the study, which was presented at a recent meeting of the American Medical Society for Sports Medicine in New Orleans.

When compared strictly by age, the skin samples overall matched what would be expected, in that older volunteers had thicker outer layers of skin and significantly thinner inner layers.

But the researchers compared the skin samples by exercise habits, they found that after age 40, the men and women who exercised frequently had thinner, healthier stratum corneum, and thicker dermis layers in their skin.

In other words, their skin was comparable that of the 20- and 30-year-olds than to that of others of their age, even if they were past age 65.

To rule out other factors – such as diet, genes and lifestyles – that might have influenced the differences in skin condition, the scientists then asked the sedentary volunteers to start exercising.

What they found was that while the volunteers aged at 65 or older had normal skin for their age at the start of the study, they also experienced changes after exercising that made their skin more youthful.

In fact, significant changes were evident in the participants’ skin biopsies after just three months of working out twice a week by jogging or cycling at a moderately strenuous pace for 30 minutes (equivalent to at least 65 percent of their maximum aerobic capacity).

Under a microscope, the volunteers’ skin “looked like that of a much younger person, and all that they had done differently was exercise,” Tarnopolsky e said.