How Exercise Affects Skin and Collagen

If I told you exercise could make you look younger in more ways than one, wouldn't you drop everything and see what this was all about? We all know exercise can make our bodies younger, our muscles stronger, and our limbs more limber, but what about our skin? Does exercise have any effect on our skin behavior and potentially, an impact on how our skin LOOKS? Let's go over all of the wonderful benefits of reversing aging through exercise that science is just now learning about.

Cell Growth

First let's start off with a big one, regular exercise helps promote new cell growth. Especially any exercise that has high intensity to it. Your heart pumping hard helps activate a response called telomerase activity, better known as an anti-aging response. This enzyme, if increased, helps protect our DNA which leads to better cell growth and replication.

Improves Elasticity

The oxygen flow we get from working out has an even better effect on our skin then we thought. Increased oxygen flow helps bring nutrients into our muscles and our brains, but those nutrients go into our ligaments and skin too, which improves elasticity. Normally we think of elasticity when we talk about hydration. The more water in our system the easier our joints move and the healthier our skin and muscles. But we now know that oxygen flow can do the same thing. Just by working out and getting our heart rate up, we improve our bodies ability to move more efficiently and more smoothly. Which in turn helps us look and move better as we age.

Boost Collagen

Last but not least, the biggest one of them all, regular exercise can boot the production of collagen. Collagen is like the end all be all of anti-aging. It's the word you want to see on a product to help your skin. Well, you don't have to buy those expensive skin products with collagen in them, turns out you just need to exercise and sweat a couple times a week! How's that for free anti-aging advice? The main benefit from this collagen from working out, is it reduces the appearance of existing wrinkles, but it also prevents new ones from forming.

That sounds like an easy skin care routine to me.

Now there can be negatives to what working out can do for your skin, such as making rosacea worse, clogging pores and causing breakouts, or in some cases cause rashes. But most of these are either preventable with the right skin care routine BEFORE you work out, or you are past the hormonal stages of your early twenties and thirties and it's not a concern anymore. As far as I'm concerned and what this new research suggests, working out might just be the best anti-aging routine you can ever start.