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It's been 286 days since astronauts Sonny Williams and Butch Wilmore have felt the pull of Earth's gravity. Gravity is really, really tough, tough, learning to live with it, but also without it. Our bodies were really built to work in gravity at NASA. Countermeasures lab exercise routines and equipment are designed to help prevent astronauts from losing bone and muscle mass while they're in space. Force is what helps our muscles get stronger, forces what helps our bones to stay strong, forces what helps our heart to stay strong by having to pump the blood against gravity. So when you take that force away. You all of *** sudden lose *** really important stimulus that's important for health. It would be the same thing as uh if someone was uh confined to *** bed because they had an injury uh for *** long time it's. People lose their muscle strength. They lose their bone strength. That's why astronauts spend hours each day exercising while on the space station. In fact, back in 2012, Williams even showed me how she was preparing to do *** triathlon from space so that she could compete with me while I was doing *** triathlon on Earth. You're going 17,500 miles an hour. I'll be dumb like that. What am I saying? I'll, I'll be done way before you. So I'll base it on time. But again, we are talking about an unnatural environment for humans. When you're in space, body fluid shift from the legs to the head and upper body as much as 2 L of fluid. NASA says *** natural reaction to this is *** decrease in the total amount of blood in your blood vessels that can result in low blood pressure or hypotension. We've even started to see how long duration flights directly impacts the brain. Look here, you can see that the brain shifts up ever so slightly in the skull and the fluid surrounding and protecting it expand. You know, have, you know, me being there for such *** long time they can see how that, you know, environmental effects affect us on *** genetic level and what that means to our, our health. Astronaut Scott Kelly knows this better than most people. He spent 340 days aboard the International Space Station for NASA's twin study. That's where they compared his physical state in space. To his twin brother Mark back on Earth, they found that space impacted *** host of things, like his eyes, his balance, his gut microbes, his cognitive abilities, and even his gene expression, but then. Touchdown. The body has to adapt again when it is thrust back to earth. When you get back. Gravity starts pulling everything to your lower extremities, the fluid that is shifting, you know, I got *** little puffy face. It's always that way when you're when I'm in space, and all that fluid is gonna be pulled to my lower extremities and it's really gonna be different. Even to lift *** pencil. You don't even feel *** pencil when you lift it. When we get back, even to lift *** pencil, we will feel the weight. And it will take time to adjust. In fact, when Kelly landed back on Earth in 2016, he was actually 2 inches taller. But then, as gravity took hold, his height, along with most of the other physical changes, did eventually go back to baseline. It took about 6 months. With the study concluding that human health can be mostly sustained for *** year in space. Kelly did, however, find some benefits. When I got back on my previous flight, I was getting *** massage at one of these like massage envy places. The lady goes, she goes, you have the softest feet I've ever felt in my life, and she did not know I was in space, and I was like, thank you. I'm very proud of them. Doctor Sanjay Gupta, CNN reporting.