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You know exercise is good for your health<\/a>, but life can get in the way of your physical fitness. Perhaps you don\u2019t have as much time to hit the gym as you\u2019d like, or have a medical condition that prevents you from exercising at all. Maybe you hate working out. Wouldn\u2019t it be easier if you could just take a pill to reap the rewards of exercise?<\/p>\n The idea may not be so far-fetched. After testing new drug compounds that appear to mimic the physical benefits of exercise in rodents, scientists say a pill may someday be able to do the same in humans. Bahaa Elgendy, Ph.D.<\/a>, a medicinal chemist and associate professor of anesthesiology at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis<\/a>, was scheduled to present his team\u2019s findings Monday at the spring meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS)<\/a>.<\/p>\n As you age, you gradually lose muscle mass, strength, and function\u2014a type of atrophy called sarcopenia<\/a>. Elgendy\u2019s team hopes an exercise-mimicking pill could treat muscle atrophy and improve the physical fitness of people with serious ailments such as cancer, heart failure, and neurodegenerative diseases<\/a>, according to an ACS news release<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re not saying by any means or forms that people shouldn\u2019t exercise,\u201d Elgendy tells Fortune<\/em> ahead of his presentation. \u201cBut [the drug] hopefully will help people who cannot exercise. And, in other cases, it can complement exercise programs to give more benefits to patients as well.<\/p>\n \u201cOr, it can be combined with the new wave of drugs: anti-diabetic drugs and drugs that are used for obesity and weight loss<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n Elgendy and his team spent about a decade developing a compound called SLU-PP-332<\/a>. It activates a group of proteins called estrogen-related receptors<\/a>\u2014ERR\u03b1, ERR\u03b2, and ERR\u03b3\u2014which Elgendy says are \u201cresponsible for activating some of the most important metabolic pathways in tissues with high-energy demand.\u201d The most elusive target, ERR\u03b1, regulates exercise-induced stress adaptation as well as physiological muscle processes.\u00a0Mice treated with SLU-PP-332 showed improved endurance running on a rodent treadmill. It also increased a fatigue-resistant muscle fiber in the animals, researchers found.<\/p>\n Next, the team created new, patentable molecules with the goal of making them more safe, potent, and efficacious than SLU-PP-332, Elgendy says. Further study of rat heart cells suggests the new compounds do more strongly mimic the effects of exercise.<\/p>\n \u201cThe new generations we developed that I\u2019m going to talk about today, these are predicted to make it hopefully to the clinic one day in the next five years,\u201d Elgendy tells Fortune<\/em>. \u201cThe translation from animals to humans takes a long time. We need to do a lot more preclinical testing, which is vital to ensure safety.\u201d<\/p>\n\n