If you have a couple months and sufficient motivation, you can hike the Appalachian Trail or bike across America. Do either intelligently and you’ll surely improve your fitness.

The biggest bonus beyond that is the intimate type of travel.

No flybys or train rides here. You’ll experience the United States the way it should be experienced, up close, personal, and slow paced.

Yet it’s the slow place that makes this plan improbable. What are the chances you could leave your family and workplace for that long?

No worries. Exercise at the right pace, remain in your same place, and you’ll still experience a different state.

A more youthful one.

But that’s old news, you say. It is, in this way.

Dozens of previous studies have found if you exercise regularly as you age, aging is delayed. Consider, for instance, research published in November 2018 by the Journal of Applied Physiology and performed at the Human Performance Laboratory at Ball State University.

To assess cardiovascular fitness and overall health, researchers there tested 70-year-olds and 20-year-olds who had exercised regularly for years and 70-year-olds who hadn’t. While the tests ascertained that the older exercisers were not nearly as fit as the exercising twenty-somethings, they were far healthier than their non-exercising counterparts.

So much healthier, lead researcher and director of the Human Performance Laboratory Scott Trappe told Medical News Today, that their hearts and blood vessels resembled those typically found in people 25 to 30 years younger.

But today’s article isn’t as much about exercise’s ability to delay aging as it’s about what may at first strike you as far-out science-fiction.

Reversing it.

For you to fathom how reversing aging can indeed be science fact, you simply need to understand what two sets of researchers have been able to accomplish recently in their work with mice. And an elementary explanation of epigenetics would help with that.

The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences suggests you see your cell’s DNA as coming with an instruction manual and that epigenetics tells your genes which pages of the manual to read. It’s a reading that helps determine which genes get “turned off” or “turned on,” and the reading can be triggered or disrupted by a number of factors.

Such as, infections, diseases, tobacco and alcohol use, environmental pollutants, stress, aging, diet, obesity, and physical activity, aka exercise.

So researchers at the University of Arkansas’ Exercise Research Center worked with lab mice and four of the proteins in their bodies (proteins that we have, too) that have the ability to turn genes off and on. The mice were on average 22 months old, which equates to a human being about 73 years of age.

Some of the mice were allowed to run on an unweighted exercise wheel a week. For the next 8 weeks, that wheel became progressively heavier by attaching magnetic weights to it.

Compared to the non-exercising mice, the exercise took the exercisers’ muscles to what a James Kingsland article for MNT called a “more youthful state.” A change that was dramatic enough for one of the UA researchers, Dr. Kevin Murach, to tell Kingsland, “Exercise is the most powerful drug we have.”

We also have a second recent study that suggests the same.

In it, researchers at the Harvard Medical School aged mice by making what another MNT article calls “cuts” in their DNA. Soon the mice looked and acted older.

The aging was confirmed by an increase in insulin, glucose, triglycerides, and blood pressure, as well as overall systemic inflammation.

But when the researchers gave the mice gene therapy (think of it as akin to the exercising you might do to rehab a knee “cut” surgically), they watched aging work in reverse.

When MNT asked the senior author of the study about this, Dr. David Sinclair, said the study shows “we can have precise control of the biological age of a complex animal; that we can drive it forwards and backward at will.”

The conclusion of the paper published in the January 2023 issue of Cell echoes that, declaring “a loss of epigenetic information is a reversible cause of aging.”

A doctor not involved in the study, Dr. Santosh Kesari, a neurologist at Providence Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, CA, and Regional Medical Director for the Research Clinical Institute of Providence Southern California called the findings “very exciting,” but then added something that I’ll take (or maybe twist?) as a way to place the onus on you: “Certainly, we don’t want to wait [for] 10, 20, or 30 years to do aging studies, so the challenge is really ... ”

Is really yours.

To find an exercise routine that takes you to a more youthful state - whether you’re 75, 55, or 35 - and to stick to it.