The study found that a drug de­vel­oped for the treat­ment of met­a­bol­ic dis­ease, when tak­en in com­bina­t­ion with ex­er­cise, gives mice the abil­ity to run far­ther than ex­er­cise alone can. And an­oth­er chem­i­cal en­dowed mice with great­er en­dur­ance, even with­out the work­out.

“We re­vealed that syn­thet­ic PPARd ac­tiva­t­ion and ex­er­cise or more im­por­tantly AMPK ac­tiva­t­ion alone… re-programs the skele­tal mus­cle ge­nome and dra­mat­ic­ally en­hances en­dur­ance,” the re­search­ers wrote. “We be­lieve that the strat­e­gy of re-organizing the pre­set ge­net­ic im­print of mus­cle (as well as oth­er tis­sues) us­ing ex­er­cise mi­met­ic drugs has ther­a­peu­tic po­ten­tial in treat­ing cer­tain mus­cle dis­eases such as wast­ing and frail­ty as well as obes­ity where ex­er­cise is known to be ben­e­fi­cial.”