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If you need a nudge toward the gym or your running shoes, science has delivered yet another reason your skin.

According to new research, exercise may prove to be the best kept anti-aging secret for youthful skin. We have long appreciated the benefits of regular exercise on our heart, brain, bone and muscle, but now it appears that exercise may also keep your skin youthful as well.

Facial aging and skin deterioration are the undeniable rites of passage with aging. With time, the skin ages with the appearance of fine lines, wrinkles, pigmentation, loss of elasticity and textural changes.

Despite the certainty of these changes, scientists are still unsettled on the causes. Over the past decade there has been a shift in our understanding of the causes of facial aging. What we once thought was a process of stretching and sagging, we now know has much more to do with deflation and deterioration.

Using powerful microscopes to magnify skin and wrinkles and better understand the cellular changes underpinning aging, detailed scientific surveys have shown that all layers from the deep subcutaneous tissues (bone, fat, muscle) to the soft tissue matrix of the dermis and epidermis (including collagen and elastin fibres) deflate and deteriorate as we age.

The loss of structural support leads to deflation and the appearance of deep folds and those infamous jowls. While these living skin layers thin dramatically, the outermost layer, the stratum corneum, comprised of dead cells, grows thicker. As a result, aging skin becomes more coarse, dehydrated and lax.

Researchers from McMaster University have found that in mice models, regular exercise has been shown to stave off and reverse the signs of early aging. As compared to sedentary mice, those given access to running wheels maintained healthier brains, hearts, muscles, reproductive organs and fur over a longer period of time.

The active mices fur did not grey and they did not develop furrows and wrinkles. In mice, exercise was having a beneficial impact on preventing and reversing common signs of aging.

Not all mouse models bear true in humans. The McMaster anti-aging exercise study recalls another mouse model that showed age reversal with rejuvenative effects on tissue and reproductive potential. Repeated mice studies showed that caloric restriction in aging female mice stopped reproductive aging, diminished the appearance of fat depots, wrinkles, greying of the fur, and prevented diabetes, heart disease and bone loss. Caloric restriction, though, did not prove a successful anti-aging strategy in human subjects.

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Can you exercise your way to youthful skin?