Our group has been involved in studying the health effects of exercise for over twenty years. Our major aim was originally to test whether free radicals associated with exercise could lead to damage in muscle and to protect these muscles by various interventions, such as training and nutrition. Very recently we found that administration of oral antioxidants, especially in high doses, may hamper adaptations to exercise and we were pioneers in finding that high doses of antioxidant vitamins are bad for you when you perform exercise, particularly at the level of training. More recently we were especially concerned with the role of exercise in the prevention of muscle wasting associated with immobilisation as well as age (sarcopaenia). In the long term, we aim to find ways to promote the health effect of exercise and indeed we have recently come up with the idea that exercise is so good for you that it can be considered as a drug: we have recently proposed the idea that “exercise is a drug”.