Getting fit makes your brain work better

Getting fit makes your brain work better

People realise that working out is excellent for them. It helps you lose weight and keep it off. It's healthy for your heart and blood vessels. And it usually helps you stay fit and healthy.

But did you know that working out is excellent for your mind too? It can really help you get smarter. Exercise can also help keep you from getting diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and depression. It can even make it more likely that you will get better after a stroke or severe brain injury.

Exercise helps you learn and remember things.

It turns out that exercise really does activate hormonal support systems in your brain. When you turn these systems on, they make the brain circuits you already have stronger and help you make new ones.

Exercise makes a number of growth factors in the brain work harder. These factors assist brain cells stay alive and split into new neurones, which are brain cells. There are only a few parts of the brain that can make new neurones, and exercise makes these parts make more neurones and do it faster.

Working out also makes the brain have more blood flow. In lab tests, exercise made more blood arteries available to different parts of the brain. This makes it easier for nutrients to get to and waste to leave important areas that affect mental function.

The hippocampus is one part of the brain that makes new neurones. Learning, remembering, and paying attention all depend on the hippocampus. Exercise makes new neurones sprout in the hippocampus and helps with many types of cognitive tasks.

Working out is good for your mental health.

The hippocampus also plays a big part in how we deal with stress. Studies have shown that war veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder had a smaller hippocampus. Stress hurts the hippocampus and can kill neurones, which is the opposite of what happens when you work out.

others who work out a lot know that they can deal with stress considerably better during the day than others who don't work out. Exercise and stress have opposite effects on the hippocampus, and exercise makes your "buffer" better so you can tolerate the stress better.

It's interesting that antidepressants act in a similar way. We don't know exactly how antidepressants work, but we do know that some types of them boost the number of new neurones in the hippocampus. They work out just as exercise does!

Antidepressants work by turning on the same growth factor systems in the brain as exercise does. Like exercise, they also make new neurones sprout in the hippocampus. Psychiatrists have known for a long time that people with depression do significantly better in therapy if they also work out on a regular basis. In some circumstances, just exercising is enough to help with depression symptoms.

A lot of kids and adults are on antidepressants these days. I have to wonder how many of them could stop taking them if they got more exercise. Of sure, some people need and benefit from anti-depressant therapy. But the number of prescriptions nowadays, especially for kids, is out of control.

Exercise keeps the brain healthy and safe from harm.

Research also shows that exercise keeps the brain from getting older and hurt. Older people who work out regularly do better on mental tasks and have a lower risk of getting Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease. They also get well from strokes and brain injuries that happen by accident.

Some people would say that there are numerous things in the lives of persons who exercise that could explain these results. For instance, they eat better, smoke less, and so on. But research on animals in the lab also backs up the assumption that exercise is good for you. In lab experiments, animals that get exercise are less likely to get traumatic brain injuries, and in model systems, they don't get as bad of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease.

Studies also demonstrate that exercise is not only good for protecting the brain, but it is also a useful treatment for brain function. Fitness training increases cognitive processes like planning, scheduling, coordinating tasks, and paying attention. Adults who work out have more grey matter, which means they have more brain cells, than adults who don't work out.

Put your attention on the young family.

Starting to exercise early in life makes all of the good things about it even better. It's similar to how interest builds up in a bank. The sooner you start saving, the more money you will have to earn interest on later. But sadly, schools are cutting back on physical education because they don't have enough money. Soccer moms need to work together to bring exercise back to our schools.

Getting our kids to be physically active is very important. Studies demonstrate that people tend to stick with the ways of life they learn about when they are young. If you don't teach them how important it is to be active today, they are more likely to do it as adults. We need to teach our kids how important it is to be physically active today so that they can be mentally active people for the rest of their lives. If we don't, we're really hurting them.

A lot of us as parents forget to think about our kids' futures. We have a lot on our minds every day, so stopping our kids from going to the old-folks home too soon isn't at the top of our list. Sadly, two out of three persons 65 and older don't conduct any regular physical activity, which means they aren't getting the brain protection they could be.

What we do with our kids now and the values we teach them will have a big effect on their success in life. Yes, kids are their own people once they leave our homes and can spend their life whatever they wish. Still, we need to give them a boost now so they can achieve the success they deserve.

Even if this is your first time as a parent, please know that what you think is essential today will affect many decades to come.

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