Exercise not only appears to keep skin younger, it may also even reverse skin aging in people who start exercising late in life, according to surprising new research.

After about age 40, most of us begin to experience a thickening of our outer layer of skin. This layer of skin gets drier, flakier and denser with age. At the same time, the layer of skin beneath begins to thin and loses elasticity, giving the skin a more translucent and often saggier appearance. These changes are solely the result of the passage of time.
Recently, researchers at McMaster University in Ontario began to wonder if this aging was inevitable. Researchers set a group of sedentary volunteers to exercising, after first obtaining skin samples from their buttocks. The volunteers were aged at 65 or older and, at the study’s start, had normal skin for their age. They began a fairly straightforward endurance training program, working out twice a week by jogging or cycling at a moderately strenuous pace, equivalent to at least 65 percent of their maximum aerobic capacity for 30 minutes. This continued for three months. At the end of the study time, the researchers again biopsied the volunteers’ skin and the skin of the study volunteers no longer correlated with their true age, but the outer and inner layers that looked very similar to those of 20- to 40-year-olds. “It was pretty remarkable to see,” said Dr. Tarnopolsky, himself a middle-aged exerciser. Under a microscope, the volunteers’ skin “looked like that of a much younger person, and all that they had done differently was exercise.”