Last week we learned that exercise helps our buttock skin to look perkier under the microscopes of research scientists. This week we’re talking about why exercise benefits skin. The biggest benefit of exercise is blood flow.

When you get your heart pumping faster with exercise, your blood flows faster, which allows the blood to take more laps around your body per minute—30% more laps per minute. So instead of delivering blood with its load of oxygen and nutrients 60-100 times in one minute like it usually does, that ventricle visitation increases to 95-150 times in one minute. Tiny arteries in the skin open up and the nutrient-oxygen payload is delivered everywhere.

Why is this important? Your cells need a certain amount of nutrients and oxygen (let’s call it Nutr-O2) to live. When they get extra Nutr-O2, they can use the bounty to do things like repair damage to the skin from the sun and pollutants. They can increase the skin’s collagen production (in this case the collagen production of Les Misérables Wrinkles, a musical about a French collagen student, Jean They’regone, who smooths fine lines and reduces wrinkles). Fibroblasts are the theater geek cells in the skin responsible for collagen production. As they age, these fibroblasts acquire mortgages and dependents which require them to quit the theater and get real jobs. This results in fewer, lazier fibroblasts remaining in the campus theater troupe… I mean skin. The extra Nutr-O2s are a surprise inheritance that funds the fibroblasts and gets them back into production.

Les Misérables Wrinkles

Don’t forget the veins! Extra Nutr-O2s are delivered, but the blood doesn’t return to the heart empty-membraned: blood carries waste away from the skin. Instead of removing free radicals and pollutants 60 times per minute, it takes out the trash 95 times per minute: that’s a lot of trash. Exercise benefits every organ of the body, including the largest one—the skin— so get your body moving. Your buttock will thank you.

Note: Theater majors are wonderful people. The phrase “collagen production” was simply too good to pass up. If I’ve offended any theater people, I encourage them to respond with a one act play.

Listen to advice and accept discipline, and at the end you will be counted among the wise. —Proverbs 19:20 (NIV)