Skin In Motion: Exercise & Your Skin

Whether it's an hour-long run, a morning at the gym, or a few hours on the bike, exercise asks a lot of the body. Your heart rate rises, circulation increases, your body temperature climbs, and eventually, you sweat. Add sun, wind, heat, or cold, and there can be quite a lot happening by the time you finish.

Your skin is there for all of it.

Exercise and Your Skin

The benefits of regular exercise extend beyond stronger muscles and better cardiovascular fitness. As your heart rate rises, circulation increases throughout the body, including the skin. Blood vessels near the skin also widen as the body works to release excess heat.

Sweating is part of that same response. As body temperature rises, sweat brings water to the surface of the skin, where its evaporation helps cool the body. While that moisture is temporary, it is another example of how actively the skin participates in exercise.

Sweating isn't something your skin needs protecting from. It's part of a system doing exactly what it is designed to do.

The opportunity is to support what happens next. Once sweat evaporates, your skin continues to lose water naturally. A good skin care routine can help replenish that moisture and support the barrier responsible for keeping it there.

While You Train

Exercise temporarily changes the conditions at the surface of your skin. Sweat brings water, salts, and other compounds to the surface while heat and moisture increase. Depending on what you're doing, friction from a hat, helmet, clothing, or other equipment can become part of that environment too.

The conditions around you add another variable. Heat, humidity, cold, wind, and sun all influence what your skin experiences while you train. A run along the West Side Highway in August creates a very different environment for your skin than the same run in January.

None of this makes exercise or sweating bad for your skin. It simply means that skin, like the rest of the body, is responding to the conditions you put it through.

Once the water in sweat evaporates, some salt and other material can remain on the skin. Washing after training helps remove that buildup, particularly when you've been sweating heavily or wearing equipment for an extended period.

There is also another form of water loss taking place that is much easier to miss.

Your Skin Is Always Losing Water

Sweat is the water loss you notice. Your skin loses water in another way all the time.

Water naturally moves through the outer layers of your skin and into the surrounding air, a process known as transepidermal water loss. Unlike sweat, you can't see it happening.

Your skin barrier helps regulate that process by limiting how readily water escapes. Supporting that barrier helps the skin retain moisture and remain comfortable as conditions around it change.

Supporting Your Skin Around Training

You already support the work you put in through what happens around it. You hydrate. You eat. You recover. Skin care can be approached with the same basic logic.

After training, gently cleansing helps remove the sweat, salt, oil, and buildup that accumulate on the skin. Moisturizing helps replenish water in the outer layers of the skin and support the barrier that helps keep it there. Before heading outside, sunscreen helps protect exposed skin from the sun.

Cleanse. Moisturize. Protect.

The work you put into exercise is already an investment in taking care of yourself. A simple skin care routine builds on that same effort by extending that care to your skin.

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