Can the way you train change how old you look? In this episode, Amy Hudson and Dr. James Fisher continue their deep dive into aging, focusing on how strength training impacts the body far beyond muscle and strength. They explore how resistance training affects skin elasticity, the biological processes behind skin aging, and why exercise may play a bigger role in appearance than most people realize. Tune in to discover how training can reshape not just performance, but the way you age.

• Amy shares how aging quietly reshapes your appearance over time. Skin loses its firmness, wrinkles begin to show, and the mirror reflects a different version of you than your twenties. 
• Dr. Fisher explains how strength training does not just build muscle, it directly impacts skin elasticity. That connection alone changes how we should think about exercise and aging.
• Dr. Fisher covers a key research paper exploring how resistance training can rejuvenate aging skin by reducing inflammation and improving its internal structure.
• Dr. Fisher explains what the extracellular matrix actually means. He describes it as the framework that gives your skin its strength, shape, and quality. When that structure improves, your skin does not just look better, it functions better.
• Dr. Fisher points out that the skin is the body’s largest organ and your first line of defense against infection. The way your skin looks can reflect how well your body is holding up internally.
• Dr. Fisher covers the real reasons skin breaks down over time. He walks through external factors like sun exposure and pollution, alongside internal changes like hormones and inflammation. 
• Amy shares a simple but powerful idea about health and appearance. She explains that when something in the body is functioning well, the skin often looks better too.
• Amy and Dr. Fisher agree that personal training should go beyond just fat loss and muscle gain. They cover that the real win is how strength training improves overall health. This shifts the goal from looking fit to actually aging healthier.
• Dr. Fisher reveals how the researchers split participants into aerobic training and resistance training groups to compare outcomes. 
• Dr. Fisher covers how scientists measured skin elasticity. He introduces the cutometer, a tool designed to test how skin responds to movement and pressure.
• Dr. Fisher reveals how researchers used ultrasound to examine deeper layers of the skin and assess dermal thickness and structure.
• Dr. Fisher shares the results that stood out. Both aerobic and resistance training improved skin elasticity and overall structure after sixteen weeks.
• Dr. Fisher reveals where resistance training truly separates itself. Only the resistance group showed improvements in dermal thickness, a key marker of stronger, healthier skin. This suggests lifting weights may play a unique role in how youthful your skin looks.
• Dr. Fisher covers the internal changes that support these visible results. Both training styles improved blood markers linked to skin health and reduced inflammation. It shows that what is happening beneath the surface is just as important as what you see.
• According to Amy, strength training does not just make you stronger; it supports healthier, more resilient skin. It reframes exercise as something that upgrades your entire system, not just your physique.
• Amy shares the real takeaway for anyone investing in personal training. The right program does not just change how your body performs, it also changes how your skin looks and feels.

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Not only do our muscles get stronger and healthier, but our skin gets stronger and healthier when we strength train. In the present context, resistance training improved appearance, skin elasticity, and skin health. Yes, I mean, I can’t wait to know how a Q -dometer works. Welcome to the Strength Changes Everything podcast, where we introduce you to the information, latest research, and tools that will enable you to live a strong, healthy life. On this podcast, we will also answer your questions about strength, health, and well -being. I’m Amy Hudson.

I own and operate three exercise coach studios. My co -hosts are Brian Sagan, co -founder and CEO of The Exercise Coach, and Dr. James Fisher, leading researcher in evidence -based strength training. And now for today’s episode. Welcome back to the Strength Changes Everything podcast. Today is the first episode in a series of episodes all about how strength training can help reverse signs of aging. So if you recall last week in our intro episode, we just described what aging really can look like and mean.

And we all understand kind of and have an image in our mind of what it means to get older. And one of the first things that often comes to mind for people is your physical appearance changing, your skin starts to look wrinkly and saggy, right? And your hair goes gray and you look like an older version of yourself than you did when you were in your 20s. One thing that is super interesting that a lot of people out there don’t know is that there is a connection between strength training and exercise and skin elasticity. So I think a lot of us know at a basic level, you know, that our skin’s appearance can be influenced by, you know, how much water we’re drinking, or if we’re consuming a lot of alcohol, sometimes our face can look puffy, and things like that, right? If we’re not sleeping, our face can look puffy.

looking different. But at a higher level, ongoing strength training exercise can actually help to improve your skin elasticity. So we’re going to talk about what research is behind this and where this concept originates. And Dr. Fisher is going to walk us through, you know, what studies have shown about this. It’ll be very interesting and enlightening for us to learn about this today. Dr. Fisher, how are you?

I’m doing fantastic today, Amy. Thank you. How are you? Good, good. I’m well. I’m a lady and I like to look good, right?

And I want my skin to look good and there’s so many creams I could buy, right? But let’s talk today about, I’m super excited to learn about how exercise, resistance exercise can play into that anti -aging for skin elasticity. So what article or what research are we going to share today about this? Yeah, I’m particularly excited about this study. We discussed this theme of a series of episodes discussing how resistance training reverses aging. And of course, one of the things that you said to me is, oh, we should see if there’s any research about appearance and about skin elasticity.

And I thought, oh, Uh, this is a little bit outside of my, my remit, my scope of practice. I don’t know that I’ve read any research around there, but, but as we’ve talked about previously about going away and do the literature searches, I went away and did exactly that. And I found this really fascinating study that I want to introduce to the listeners today. And it’s by, uh, a group of Japanese authors and its title, and I put it on the screen for the, for the people at home watching on YouTube. Resistance training rejuvenates aging skin by reducing circulating inflammatory factors and enhancing dermal immunity. matrices.

I mean, you’ve already given this away in what you said at the start, that strength training can improve skin elasticity. But I really want to talk through some of the things in this study because I found it really interesting to go through. Right. I’m excited to learn how that works, right? So yeah, let’s go through it. Yeah okay so the first thing is they actually compared a group of people doing two different exercise protocols.

So they had 56 women aged between 41 and 59 and they were identified as healthy sedentary women and half of them did aerobic training for 16 weeks where they cycled for 30 minutes at 65 to 70 percent of their max heart rate. And the other half of the group did a resistance training program for 16 weeks, where they did a typical three sets of 10 exercises. It’s that magic three sets of 10 again. Three sets of 10 exercises, of 10 repetitions, I should say, for six different exercises. Leg curl, leg extension, arm curl, seated row, shoulder press, and chest press. So a pretty standard workout.

So that was the training protocol that they described. But it’s maybe worth me taking a step back here because while we’re talking about skin in terms of appearance and elasticity and in terms of looking younger and so forth, the authors in their introduction highlight some really important points to consider about about skin health in general and what they call the extracellular matrix. So the extracellular matrix, just for clarity, is kind of effectively a measure of the quality of skin. It’s how well our skin is structured. And one of the things they highlight is that skin is actually the largest organ in the body. And it’s

the primary barrier against infection and disease. Now that I’ve said that, I’m sure most people will say, well, of course it is, but it’s worth remembering that. So our skin is not just a marker of our appearance, but the skin quality is a marker of our health in terms of being able to fight or resist infection and disease. Now the authors go on to say that the skin constitutes part of the neuroendocrine system and that it can release hormones, neurotransmitters in response to external and local stress. So we’ve maybe experienced, you know, heat or sun exposure and had a response in our central system as a response to that external stress. And then they go on to say, obviously, that the extracellular matrix degradation, so the breakdown of skin over time, is caused by a couple of key things.

So externally, it can be sun exposure and air pollution, and internally or intrinsically, it can be age -related hormonal changes on your endocrine system, as we said, and an increase in inflammatory cytokines. So the things that we typically think are going to happen with aging almost regardless of our exercise habits. And they kind of went on to say that there’s some evidence to say that skin elasticity can be improved in people following aerobic training, but no one had ever looked at the effects of resistance training. And hence, why they divided participants into two groups, the aerobic and the resistance training groups. I like what you reminded us too, because when we think about skin, it is very tempting just to think about physical appearance, but I like the reminder, you know, the quality of your skin is also going to influence your disease risk or your infection risk and health in that way going forward.

I think a lot of us forget that, but I think it’s doing us a double favor, right, if we can get that skin stronger. And I like the point that you just made of there are external factors that break down the quality of our skin and internal. And so we have to address both, right? So I’m sure we’re going to get into that more. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I think it’s really important that if something is healthy, it functions well.

And we talk about this in terms of muscle all the time, but I think that’s true of skin, that its appearance to some extent is a marker of its health and its quality and its ability to resist infection, disease, as we said. So the researchers before and after this 16 -week intervention. So before the intervention they measured skin elasticity and they talked a bit about why skin elasticity is so important and they talked about how collagen breaks down over time, how elastin fibers degrade and ultimately the extracellular matrix weakens and so the structure of skin starts to degrade and break down. They also measured upper dermal structure and they measured dermal thickness. Now, I should at this point clarify, this is way outside my area of research. I’ve never done any research in this topic at all.

And if there are any dermatologists listening and I mispronounce or I misquote something here, or I don’t explain something with good enough clarity, please feel free to go to the website and send us a note or a comment to help me to learn this. I was excited to go through this paper and really learn some new things. So hopefully I can pass that over in, uh, in the right way. So the first, the first thing that they did is they made a sketch. elasticity. And when I first read the paper, I thought, I don’t know how you would measure skin elasticity.

And then I found the tool that they make reference to, and I absolutely love this name. It’s called a cutometer. Now, Now, in my head, a cutometer is a measure of how cute something is. So maybe that’s exactly why it was named that way. I have no information as to why it was named the way it was. That wasn’t what I was interested in.

What I was more interested in is how it works. And I read this paper and I read some other research to get some more detail as to how it worked. And so I’ll explain that if that’s okay, Amy. Yes. I mean, I can’t wait to know how a cutometer works. So they place a probe on the skin and the device effectively acts like a vacuum.

It’s got gentle suction and it pulls the skin upward into the probe. And then when the suction stops, the device measures how quickly and how completely the skin returns to its original shape. okay so and from that what you actually get is what’s called an elastic recovery rate and the elastic recovery rate is a factor of of first of all the topical deformation so how much the skin stretched when the suction was applied and then the immediate recovery. So how much it springs back after the suction stops. And that’s obviously, you know, a measure of elasticity, how much it stretches to begin with, and then how well it springs back after it’s been deformed. Now, in hindsight, that makes perfect sense.

But it was really interesting from my perspective to learn this. And again, I just want to repeat the name, the use of a cutometer. So that’s how they measure skin elasticity. Now, we also talked about measuring, uh, dermal structure and dermal thickness. And so they used an ultrasound for this, and this is far more comfortable for me. So an ultrasound effectively sends sound waves into the skin and then the echoes, uh, kind of make contact with things and reflect back to the ultrasound probe and help to create an image of what they’re looking at.

So ultimately it helps construct an image of different skin layers. and it helps the researchers see the outermost layer which is the epidermis and then the mid layer which is the dermis and also from that ultrasound they can start to analyze their properties. Now there’s a little bit more to add and we shouldn’t really get into too much detail on this but as age -related damage occurs, you get what’s called a sub -epidermal low echogenic band. And that’s a small black band that effectively appears below the epidermis and or between the epidermis and the dermis, I should say. So they were also able to sort of look at that and see how that was affected by exercise. So there’s a few things there that they looked at.

And then finally, the other thing that they were interested in is they looked at some blood markers. So they took blood plasma before and after the 16 -week training intervention, and they looked at the expression of dermal extracellular matrix -related genes. And they looked at how those genes, or they specifically looked at those genes which encode collagen. and improve kind of our skin properties. And finally, they looked at some myokines, which we’ve talked about previously, and some inflammatory cytokines, which are associated with aging. And they can see all of that through the blood.

work. Right, right. So when they take the blood, they’re able to spin it and they’re able to then identify certain genetic expression or certain myokines or expression of certain cytokines and so forth. Yeah. So there’s a lot happening here and it’s an incredibly detailed study from this context. So, you know, absolute kudos to the researchers themselves.

I’m sure studies like this are not very frequently done because they’re very expensive to do, to take in this kind of detail. So, yeah, so it’s a fantastic study from that perspective. OK, so now I’m on the edge of my seat, though, to find out what happened. Okay yeah absolutely and this is the bit we’re all interested in right. So it’s worth clarifying that there was two groups there was the aerobic training group and there was a resistance training group and they reported that both groups improved skin elasticity and upper dermal structure after the 16 weeks of training. So pre to post intervention both groups had improved skin appearance in the form of elasticity and the epidermal structure in terms of the extracellular matrix.

So that’s really good. That’s great news. What’s even greater news, from our perspective as advocates of resistance training, is that the resistance training group also improved dermal thickness, which are measures of kind of skin strength. It’s a further measure of elasticity, or dermal thickness can be a marker of elasticity, and it can also be a marker of appearance. So effectively, the thicker the dermal layer of skin, the healthier the skin itself. And that was improved only in the resistance training group.

You just said this is really cool. Like not only do our muscles get stronger and healthier, but our skin gets stronger and healthier when we strength train. Exactly. Exactly. Put exactly that simply, it gets stronger, it gets healthier, and with that, its appearance is improved, its elasticity, which of course is not just related to appearance, it’s functional, but our elasticity is improved. Oh, my gosh, that’s so cool.

I think that’s really cool. Yeah. And what was amazing was that this was a 16 week intervention. This wasn’t saying that, hey, if you strength train for five years, you can improve this. This is saying that in a 16 week study, you can improve this with 16 weeks of of uncomplicated resistance training. Again, this was six resistance machines that they did.

You know, it wasn’t barbell back squats or, you know, complex exercises. It was relatively simple training protocol. And of course, while they use the three sets of 10, we would, of course, say that actually they could have probably got the same benefits with one set performed to a sufficiently high degree of effort, because we know that that produces the myokines, we know that reduces inflammatory cytokines. Which brings me to the final point about the the blood markers and they said that both resistance training and aerobic training improved genetic expression and effectively improved the blood profile as a whole towards improved skin quality. So Yeah, as you just said, resistance training is great for our muscles, it’s great for a multitude of factors from a physiological and a psychological perspective, which we will talk about later in this series. But in the present context, resistance training improved appearance, skin elasticity, and skin health.

Yeah. that is so cool. It’s just one more benefit that so many people don’t know about. I love that we revealed it today, and I hope that if you heard this episode today, you’re so excited about this brand new thing that maybe a lot of people don’t realize in terms of how you age. So I think it’s a really, really cool study, and thank you for breaking it down for us. My absolute pleasure.

I hope it was useful for people. Yes, absolutely. Well, we’ll see you next week on the podcast as we dive into more areas that strength training can help us reverse the signs of aging. So I hope you’re enjoying this series and we can’t wait for next week. We will see you then. And until then, we hope you remember strength changes everything.

Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed today’s episode, please share it with a friend. You can submit a question or connect with the show at strengthchangeseverything . com. Join us next week for another episode and be sure to follow the show on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts so that you never miss another episode. Here’s to you and your best health.