Does collagen help skin for people who train outdoors?

Destruction against building: what ultraviolet light does to the dermis, how much of it an outdoor trainer receives, and what the collagen skin trials were measured against

Does collagen help skin for people who train outdoors is a question whose answer turns on a ratio that the collagen skin trials never had to face, destruction against building, and the honest page sets the two sides of the ratio before weighing them, because an outdoor trainer's skin lives on the destruction side in a way the trials' participants did not. The destruction is ultraviolet light. In fair-skinned populations ultraviolet exposure accounts for the majority of visible skin ageing, the wrinkling, coarseness, pigmentation, broken vessels and sagging that readers call ageing and that is mostly photoageing, as the comparison of sun-exposed and sun-protected skin on the same person shows at a glance; the inner arm of a seventy-year-old is a different skin from the back of the hand. It does its damage in the dermis directly. Ultraviolet A penetrates to the dermis and, with ultraviolet B's damage at the surface, switches on the matrix metalloproteinases, the enzymes that degrade collagen and elastin, within hours of exposure, so that each exposure takes a small amount of dermal collagen apart; it damages the fibroblasts that would replace what was lost and the DNA they work from; it degrades elastin into the clumped, non-functional form that gives photoaged skin its leathery sag; and over years it leaves a dermis that is thinner, more disorganised and less elastic than intrinsic ageing alone would have made it, with the destroyers ranked and ultraviolet at the top on the what destroys collagen page. An outdoor trainer receives a great deal of it. A runner, cyclist, rower, climber, footballer or outdoor lifter doing several hours a week in daylight receives ultraviolet doses several times those of an indoor worker, often concentrated in the midday hours when the dose per minute is highest, often on the face, neck, shoulders and the backs of the hands and legs that training kit leaves bare, and often without sunscreen, because sunscreen stings in sweat, runs into the eyes and feels like the wrong thing to put on before a run; sweat strips the skin's surface lipids and wind dries and chaps the barrier, so that the outdoor trainer's skin is both irradiated and stripped. That is the destruction side, and it is large. The building side is the collagen skin trials, and the honest page states what they measured and in whom: 2.5 to 10g of collagen peptides a day for eight to twelve weeks produced a few percent higher elasticity and hydration than placebo by cutometer and corneometer, a small, instrument-detected change in mostly middle-aged women who were, as trial participants generally are, living indoor lives and measured in indoor rooms, so that their few percent of building was measured against the ordinary destruction of a life mostly out of the sun. Nothing in those trials says what a few percent of building does against ten hours a week of ultraviolet, except that the arithmetic is against it: the sun's destruction in an outdoor trainer is the largest single input to their skin's state, the trials' building is the smallest measurable one, and a reader who addresses the second while ignoring the first has bought a bucket for a flood.

The one intervention that slowed skin ageing in a trial, the order for the outdoor trainer, where collagen sits in it, and the worked example

The one intervention that has slowed visible skin ageing in a randomised trial is not a supplement, and it decides the order. In a trial in Australian adults followed for four and a half years, one group was asked to use sunscreen every day and the other to use it at their discretion, as most people do, and at the end the daily-use group had measurably less skin ageing by the standardised assessment of their skin than the discretionary group, with no other intervention shown to do the same in a randomised comparison; the retinoids have biopsy evidence of new dermal collagen, on the rebuild lost collagen page, but the daily sunscreen trial is the one that moved the appearance of ageing itself, and it moved it by controlling the destruction. So for the outdoor trainer the order is set by the ratio and the honest page gives it. First, sunscreen daily and reapplied, which controls the destruction: a broad-spectrum sunscreen of at least SPF 30 on the face, neck, ears, the backs of the hands and whatever the kit leaves bare, applied before training and reapplied after two hours or a heavy sweat, with a sweat-resistant or sport formulation that does not run into the eyes, and a cap, visor or hat for the face and a long sleeve on the hottest days, since a hat shades what sunscreen misses and costs nothing to reapply. Second, timing, where the schedule allows: the ultraviolet dose per minute is several times higher at midday than in the early morning or evening, so a trainer who moves the long run or the ride out of the middle of the day has cut their dose without cutting their training. Third, the barrier: a plain moisturiser after training, once the sweat is washed off, replaces the surface lipids that sweat and wind strip and lets the barrier do its own protecting. Fourth, a retinoid at night, for a reader who wants building with biopsy evidence behind it, since topical tretinoin and its over-the-counter relatives increase new dermal collagen on biopsy over months and partially reverse photoageing, with sun sensitivity as the reason they are used at night and the reason the sunscreen comes first. Fifth and last, collagen, as a small item of building: 2.5 to 10g a day for eight to twelve weeks for the few percent the trials found, with a fixed-light photograph of one patch before starting so that the few percent is seen rather than imagined, on the is it working page, and with the expectation that the building is small and the destruction, if the first four items are missed, is larger. Collagen does not protect skin from the sun, holds no claim to, and should never be the reason a trainer skips the sunscreen; it is a building item on a list whose first item controls the flood. The worked example is the last item on that list, stated on its true terms: two capsules, 1200mg hydrolysed type 1 marine collagen with 12mg vitamin C at 15% of its reference value plus zinc, 120 for £16.99 at 28p a day, lab tested and UK made, below the 2.5 to 10g skin trial doses, carrying vitamin C's collagen formation sentence for normal skin function and zinc's skin sentence and no sun or skin claim for the collagen. Does collagen help skin for people who train outdoors: by a few percent of building at powder doses, measured indoors, against a destruction that only sunscreen, a hat and timing control, which makes it the fifth item on a five-item list.

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