What if you could experience the benefits of a gym session without moving from the couch?
For the first time, an international team led by Sydney researchers have mapped in detail the changes that occur to muscles as a result of exercise.
Could a pill mimic the benefits of exercise? Scientists think so.
The team believe their exercise blueprint is the first step towards designing drugs that can mimic its effects.
Lead researcher David James said while researchers know that exercise is good for the body, especially for weight control and treatment for type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease, they don't fully understand how it conveys those benefits.
"We'd like to map those things because we'd love to be able to get that into a bottle or pill that mimics the effects of exercise," said Professor James, from the University of Sydney's Charles Perkins Centre.
Professor James said this kind of medication would be useful for people who cannot exercise, such as the elderly or people who are unable to workout for medical reasons.
"If we could convince people to do more exercise they would get benefit from it, no question, but we do need to be thinking of ways to design [drug alternatives] especially for people who are frail," Professor James said.
As part of their research, the team studied the muscles of four unfit men, measuring how proteins inside their muscle cells changed after exercise, a process known as phosphorylation.
"It's a good way of knowing what's going on in a cell at a particular time," Professor James said.
Following an intense bout of exercise they recorded the men's skeletal muscles undergo about 1000 molecular changes, including many that had not previously been associated with exercise.
In the unfit men an intense workout turned on several stress pathways inside their muscle cells. In response, the cells would then switch on other processes that could defend it from stress in the future, in the similar way vaccines protect the body from a future infection.
"It's a bit like that saying, what doesn't kill us makes us stronger," he said.
Now the group wants to decipher the exercise-induced changes that are most potent. They'll do that by switching those pathways on and off in mice.
"We believe this is the key to unlocking the riddle of drug treatments to mimic exercise," Professor James said.
The group's research has been published in Cell Metabolism.