The Brain-Changing Benefits of Exercise: How Being Physically Active Helps Your Cognition

How Does Exercise Improve Cognition and Mental Capacity?

We all want to improve our brainpower. No one wants to suffer from Alzheimer’s or dementia. Forget reliance on drugs and pharmaceuticals to help you. If you want to be more focused and happier, exercise is the answer. And it works immediately and lasts a long time.

Professor of neuroscience Wendy Suzuki has conducted a huge amount of research into how our brains work. She has no doubt, and no hesitation, in prescribing exercise as, “the most transformative thing that you can do for your brain today.”

Suzuki talks from the hip, and from personal experience. In her TED Talk, Wendy Suzuki - The Brain Changing Benefits of Exercise, she describes her personal journey of discovery, why she started to exercise, and how she noticed that “after every sweat-inducing workout that I tried, I had this great mood boost and this great energy boost.”

When a renowned and respected authority like Wendy Suzuki says something, you sit up and take notice.

Active body, active brain: The brain-changing effects of exercise and how movement helps the brain

After a little more than a year of regular exercise, Suzuki had a sudden realization. A Eureka! moment. She was able to focus and maintain her attention for longer than she had ever done before, and her long-term memory seemed to be better.

“That’s when I put it together,” she says. “Maybe, all that exercise that I had included and added to my life was changing my brain.”

She went back to the books and discovered that a growing amount of research shows everything that she had noticed in herself. Better mood. Better energy. Better memory. Better attention.

Now, after years of her own research into the connection between exercise and brainpower, Wendy Suzuki has come to the conclusion that exercise has an immediate effect on your brain, and over the long term, regular exercise creates changes in the brain’s anatomy, physiology, and function. The outcome?

• Exercise improves your mood. It increases the levels of beneficial neurotransmitters like dopamine, noradrenaline, and serotonin.

• A single workout can boost your ability to focus – an improvement that can last at least two hours.

• Regular workouts will boost your memory.

Exercise produces new brain cells in the hippocampus and pre-frontal cortex sections of your brain, and increases their volume. This helps to protect you against memory loss, neurodegenerative diseases, and cognitive decline which is common when aging.

At the end of the day, your brain is a muscle. The more that you work out, the bigger and stronger your brain will become. This isn’t a cure for Alzheimer’s and dementia, but among the benefits of exercise on cognitive function is that it will surely help to protect you from them for longer.

What’s the minimum amount of exercise you need to take to achieve brain transformation?

Wendy Suzuki says a good rule of thumb is at least 30 minutes, three to four times each week with aerobic exercise included in your regime.

The mind-body connection ─ How does exercise improve cognitive function?

We asked Mallory Reilly, strength coach and occupational therapist at Reload PT, to help demystify the brain-changing effects of exercise.

Mallory sets the tone for her work when she describes her approach to it.

“I care very much about the person in front of me and all aspects of that person. Who they are mentally, physically, spiritually,” she says. “What you’re able to do physically is a great manifestation of who you are and what you love to do, and the person you love to be.”

In the early part of her career, Mallory was exposed to opposite ends of the age spectrum. She noticed the huge gap between how kids play, move, and love life, and how much the quality of life diminishes as people become old-aged. This observation encouraged her to seek out why – what happens between youth and old age that causes this?

“A lot of people are very deconditioned. They stop moving. Your body is deconditioned. You lose your strength – heart, and muscles – and you lose a bit of yourself.”

“Our brains work best when we move,” Mallory explains, “And so a lot of mental health issues arise because we’re not moving enough.”

This conclusion is backed up by research and facts.

For example, according to the American Heart Association, we live a far more sedentary lifestyle today. Since 1950, sedentary jobs have increased by 83%. The proportion of people working in physically active jobs has halved since 1960.

Life may be easier than it was in the 1950s, but mental health issues are rising. A study by the National Survey On Drug Use And Mental Health found that around 1-in-5 adults now suffer from mental illness, an increase of 10% in only a few years. Research conducted by NYU Langone Medical Center found that there are now more people in the United States suffering from serious psychological distress (SPD) than ever before.

While there may be many reasons for the increase in mental health issues, the link with lower levels of physical exercise cannot (and must not) be ignored.

The development of our brains and our cognitive ability is based on activity. Brains work best when we move.

“If your memory gets a little foggy, you’re not able to pay attention when doing certain things, or even if you start to become irritable, and you’re having different moods, that’s another part of losing your identity – of losing your mind, and the concept of who you are,” says Mallory.

“To be able to move and be who you are in normal life reflects your brain power. A lot of people who stop doing activities may feel things like depression or anxiety because their body and brain aren’t synched up the way that we are built genetically, and who you have grown to be through life experience.”

There is no doubt: physical activity is one of the best things you can do for your cognitive functions (memory, problem-solving skills, attention, focus, etc.).

Exercise for physical and mental fitness

At Reload, we focus on helping each of our clients to improve their physical and mental condition, so that they can reconnect to their community. And that’s crucial – we take a person-by-person approach, individualizing to each, to help improve the overall health of the community.

Our experience, research, and learning show that when adults stop participating in activities that make them who they are, they begin to lose strength, and their physical condition declines. But it isn’t only their outer health that is damaged – it’s their mental capacity and cognition. And this is not only detrimental to the person, but to their family, friends, and quality of life.

Like our other PTs and OTs, Mallory focuses on preventing this from happening. As she points out, “If you don’t use it, you lose it.”

Would you like to learn more about how exercise could help to transform your brain and cognitive function?

Right now, we are offering a complimentary fitness assessment – it’s your first step to a new and improved you. To take advantage of this, sign up for your complimentary fitness assessment today.