Exercise is so important for maintaining a healthy body that we often don’t need to spell out its specific benefits to paint the whole picture. We see fitness as a general key to a healthy lifestyle.
“Aside from the obvious health benefits, I work out because it helps me relieve stress,” said Michael Kelley, senior in biological science. “I enjoy it, and generally care about my appearance. Also, it doesn’t hurt to look good naked.”
The connection between fitness and health is an easy fact, to understand and experience.
Exercise may cause the most obvious changes to our outward appearance and internal feelings, but there are other important things at work. Like Kelley, many people see the change in our muscles, but what about in our brains?
Bad things happen as we age. Our bodies deteriorate, senses dull as receptors die, metabolism slows and we tire more easily.
But don’t fret, the world of neurological science brings good news! Like everything else on the human body, the thickness of the cerebral cortex gets thinner as we age. The cerebral cortex is the collection of the outermost cells of our forebrain that enable us with amazing powers of cognition such as singing karaoke and playing flip cup. Although aging is an eminent threat, there is a way to slow the thinning of this crucial brain mass.
“Exercise is important for the brain at any age, said James Kalat, a professor of psychology. “But the older you get the more important it becomes.”
A study by D.E. Barnes looked at fitness and simple tasks of cognition. The participants would either be assigned to an aerobic running group or an anaerobic lifting group. They followed these people for six years and the ones in the running groups had significantly less decline in memory than those in the lifting group. Sorry to the would-be body builders out there, but the benefit goes to the cross country people.
As we work out our muscles get stronger, build up more mass, and become more responsive. Fitness works in a similar way with our brains.
S.J. Colcombe did a series of studies in which he used magnetic resonance imaging to map out the brains of older adults who were assigned to various workout conditions. Individual scans were made before and after the extensive exercise which lasted months. Once the images were compared they came up with some interesting results.
Exercise not only slowed down the neural degeneration of the aerobic exercisers, it helped in the areas of the brain that are usually the most harmed from aging. This study is extremely important as it shows a biological relationship between fitness and neural degeneration.
This finding is very important and applicable to many clinical problems as it suggests a relatively easy, simple, and inexpensive way to help people out.
Exercise doesn’t just slow down the degradation of our brains, but can in fact reverse it. In another study by Colcombe they followed similar exercise groups for longer periods of time and made sure that before the experiment the people had lived a sedentary lifestyle. After the training the previously sedentary aerobic adults had an increase in several regions of the brain over the nonexercising adults. These people had gained significant brain mass and had participated in the study for a mere 6 months. The largest area of change was seen in the frontal lobes of the brain which are responsible for many higher order processes.
We can use exercise not only to delay the negative effects of aging, but to downright thwart them.
A team of researchers led by Henriette van Praag used aging mice instead of humans.
This study had two groups of mice, one set of runners and a set of bummers. Each group had very young and very old mice, all of whom had been inactive all their lives. The runners had access to a little wheel while the bummers sat around all day. Once they dissected the brains of the mice they found some interesting things.
The exercise group had more new brain cell growth, called neurogenesis, than did their same-aged lazy brethren. Here is the shocker: the mice who were almost eight times older and fit had statistically similar brains to those of the young teenage mice who sat around all day.
It is quite possible that the same concepts that work for their physiology work for our own. You know that old guy who loves to run up and down Dan Allen all day shirtless? While you’re inside playing video games he’s out being smarter than you.
Other things happen if we not only remain sedentary but become obese.
Michael Ward and his staff looked at the effect of a persons body mass index (BMI) on brain volume. They took middle-aged men and women and constructed a 3-D brain image for each of them. Once they analyzed the data they found that elevated BMI is associated with decreased brain mass.
It’s not just that exercise is correlated with a healthy brain, but that your fitness level is correlated with how healthy your brain actually is.
You won’t notice it but exercise promotes the health of your brain in a vast number of ways. Not only will your brain be bigger, but its blood vessels will be improved, its axons will have better insulation, and you will lower its risk of being afflicted by dementia later on in life. There are just a few things to keep in mind: you have to keep it up, and you can’t just pump iron.
