Exercise Boosts Brain Health & Longevity | Healthy and Fitness life

 Exercise Boosts Brain Health & Longevity

Most all of the studies yes most all of the studies that have explored the relationship between exercise brain Health and Longevity and performance. find positive effects now for some of you who are Skeptics you might be thinking well great so you can do any form of exercise. well in some sense yes I'll actually tell you this right off the bat there are good data showing that if people do six Sprints Max all out sprints on a stationary bicycle followed by one minute rest and repeat that six times you see significant acute effects on brain performance. so the brain

performance could be a memory task sometimes it is a memory task it could be what's called a Stroop task which is a cognitive flexibility task where you have to distinguish between the colors that words are written in and the content of the words okay so- called Stroop task I've talked about this on previous podcast I'll talk about it a little bit more later regardless of the cognitive test that's used that very short duration high-intensity training increases performance. significantly as well 20 or 30 minutes of so-called steady state cardio you know figuring out how fast you can run or row or swim or stationary bike for 20 to 30 minutes at a steady state and then you analyze people's cognitive performance on a memory task can be a working memory task so remembering a short string of numbers or it could be math problems it could be the stoop task any number of different tasks reveal the same thing which is that the longer duration lower intensity cardio also significantly improves performance now Do All Exercise Types Improve Learning? does that mean that you can do six rounds of 6 seconds of sprinting with a minute in between or 20 minutes of cardiovascular exercise and get the same effect on brain performance well if you're just looking at overall improvements in performance so for instance the percentage of information that you learn if you do or you don't do the exercise or if you compare those two forms of exercise that I just mentioned in that sense yes it really doesn't make a difference which may have you scratching your head but in a few moments I'll explain why that is on the other hand different forms of exercise of course impact our bodily Health differently higher intensity shorter duration exercise of course impacts things like V2 Max and which circulating hormones and neuro modulators are going to be present very differently than longer duration lower intensity exercise so too if you have people do single joint isolation resistance training exercises like a single leg leg extension or both legs leg EXT ion versus 10 sets of 10 in a squat exercise you're going to see very different specific adaptations at the physical level at the bodily level but in every case where you explore the acute the immediate changes that occur in brain output in function after people do that sort of exercise you're going to see significant increases when one does physical exercise short duration.

Exercise Immediately Enhances Brain Performance high-intensity cardio or higher intensity resistance training single joint training compound training single joint isolation exercises compound exercises one sees these increases in brain performance at least acutely in the immediate stage after the training so we have to ask ourselves. why is it how is it that all these different forms of exercise are positively impacting brain performance and the answer is very simple and fortunately gives us tremendous leverage over our exercise and how to impact our brain health and the answer is arousal however the answer isn't entirely arousal meaning not all of the positive effects of exercise on brain health longevity and performance can be explained by arousal but when I step back from the literature again an enormous literature tens of thousands of peer-reviewed papers many of which are done exceptionally well by the way as well as metaanalyses and reviews I think it's fair to say that probably 60 to 70% of the effects of exercise on brain health performance and Longevity can be explained by the specific shifts in our physiology both bodily physiology and directly within the brain's physiology during those bouts of exercise which is this increase in so-called autonomic arousal which occurs during the exercise but also extends into a window after the exercise is completed so we have to talk about this relationship between exercise arousal and acute brain performance meaning the improvements in brain performance that happen immediately after the exercise and then we'll shift our Focus to the effects of exercise that occur more chronically that is the effects of exercise on brain health and performance that occur in the hours days weeks and years after we exercise even if we are continuing to exercise every day or three times a week or whatever the frequency might be but this issue of Why Arousal Matters for Stress & Learning arousal is extremely important and I assure you it's not trivial in fact it will help you understand a number of things in the domains of deliberate cold exposure stress trauma and most importantly for today's discussion it will help you design an exercise program that's geared towards giving you the maximum bodily health effects and the maximum brain health effects there are a How to Increase Autonomic Arousal couple of different ways you can increase so-called autonomic arousal or levels of alertness sometimes it's called stress but autonomic arousal is simply an increase in the amount of activity in the so-called sympathetic arm of the autonomic nervous system which is nerd speak for more alert more aroused wide-eyed ready to move higher heart rate higher blood pressure more alertness increasing autonomic arousal improves learning in memory now it's also very important to understand that that increase in autonomic arousal can improve learning a memory if the autonomic arousal occurs after the exposure to the material most people find that a bit surprising I certainly did when I first read this paper it makes sense if you start to think about the Persistence of memories for things like traumas or bad events right bad event happens and there's this big spike in cortisol and adrenaline and those memories are hard to eradicate they're certainly hard to remove the emotional content from and if you think about it in those instances the event happens and then comes the big increase in cortisol and adrenaline so that Maps very well onto the study that I'm describing here in addition however lots of Studies have Arousal Enhances Learning Before & After Study shown that increasing autonomic arousal as measured by increases in Adrenaline or cortisol or both or any number of different measures of autonomic arousal that occurs during the exposure to the new material okay so this isn't trauma this is like new math material new history material new music material new motor skill material that you're trying to learn increases an autonomic rousel that occur as you're trying to so-called encode the information you're being exposed to that new information also significantly improve learning and it's always through increases in arousal in other words whether or not you're measuring cortisol adrenaline heart rate blood pressure galvanic skin response how wide someone's pupils are or small someone's pupils are or any combination of those things or any other measures of autonomic arousal the consistent takeaway is increases in arousal during or after in particular after trying to learn a certain material is going to improve significantly the amount of material that one learns the details of that material and the Persistence of that learning over time okay so now we've established the elevated levels of Exercising.

While Learning Improves Retention autonomic arousal either during or after and indeed also before about of learning the so-called encoding phase of learning when we're exposed to the new material that we want to learn and remember are all beneficial this is wonderful news when we look out on the whole of the literature on the relationship between exercise and brain health and performance we see studies that incorporate exercise either before or after about of learning and we also find studies believe it or not that combine exercise with learning in real time literally exposing people to new material that they're expected to learn or trying to learn while they're walking on a treadmill or running on a treadmill or cycling or rowing yes those Studies have also been done although for practical reasons they're not as numerous as the studies exploring the relationship between exercise and learning where the exercise is done before or after the bout of learning okay so what this means is wonderful Best Timing for Exercise & Learning Boosts what this means is that if you want to use exercise not just for enhancing your bodily Health but also for brain health and performance you can do that exercise before during or after bouts of learning that allows you to look at the constraints of your life for instance are you one of these people that can get up at 5: or 6 or 7:a.m. and exercise before everyone else gets up or before your workday starts or your school day starts do a round of exercise and then get into your bouts of learning whatever that material may be or are you somebody who has to dive into the work day school day family obligations Etc in which case you might only be able to exercise later in the day but you're probably still somebody who would like to enhance their brain health and performance so in that case you might organize the thing that you're trying to learn the encoding or the exposure to the thing that you're trying  to learn either in written form so you're reading or you're listening to it or you're attending a class or classes and then exercising after you're exposed to that material in order to get that elevated levels of arousal not unlike the arrangement of the studies that I was talking about earlier which used the ice exposure in order to generate increases in neural and thereby to improve learning and memory so in the Further Reading on Exercise & Cognition show note captions for this episode we've batched a number of different references that have explored the relationship between exercise and cognitive performance and across those studies and the ones that are referenced therein you'll find studies where the exercise bout was done before or the exercise bout was done during or the exercise bout was done after a round of learning or encoding of information and I should mention that different studies focus on different cognitive tasks so exercise and the arousal associated with exercise has been shown to acutely improve recall so just raw recall of material the details in material it's been shown to improve cognitive flexibility through things like the Stroop task and so in a very convenient way exercise has been shown to acutely improve performance on all those sorts of brain and memory tasks which is greatly reassuring to all of us because what it means is that it probably Learning & Exercise Work Best Close Together doesn't matter matter so much when you do your exercise or what it is that you're trying to learn it's going to be beneficial as long as the thing that you're trying to learn and the exercise are positioned fairly closely in time now all of this is focused of course on the relationship between exercise and brain function at the acute level the immediate level it's fair to say that High-Intensity Exercise Supports Long-Term Learning all high-intensity exercise and resistance training is going to support brain function in The Chronic sense in the long-term sense in fact the literature points to that and once again I've batched the references for this episode so that they're grouped together according to the specific topics and time stamps and the two studies that I recommend you look at if you're interested in this relationship between high-intensity training and cognitive function in particular executive function that cognitive flexibility I was talking about earlier such as in the Stroop task there's a wonderful article entitled executive function after exhaustive.