Top 5 Exercises to Boost Brain Health

Today we are going to discuss how different forms of exercise, resistance training, cardiovascular training of both long, medium, and short duration can be used to improve the way that your brain functions, making you better able to learn things, better able to retain information from the past, and indeed to expand your brain's capacity to learn new types of information in new ways. Okay, let's talk about the relationship between exercise, brain health and longevity, and performance. Let's just take a couple of minutes and really clearly define what we mean by exercise, because most of us have a concept of what exercise is, but for sake of understanding the relationship between exercise and brain performance, most of the peer-reviewed studies focus on two general categories of exercise, either cardiovascular exercise or resistance training. Now, of course, cardiovascular exercise can be a very short duration, high intensity, so getting heart rates up way, way, way up, or longer duration, lower intensity. Now, typically, the amount of time scales with that, so the shorter intensity stuff tends to be quick bouts of either 30 seconds, 60 seconds, sometimes two minutes, or even four minutes, all-out effort with some period of rest afterwards, or longer duration, 20, 30, 45, or even 60 minutes of cardiovascular training at a more steady state, lower intensity. And I should mention that within the tens of thousands of studies that are out there exploring the relationship between exercise and brain health and longevity, you will mostly see studies focused on cardiovascular exercise, and most of those studies early on were focused on the longer duration, lower intensity stuff, so typically 30 to 60 minutes of lower intensity, yet still elevating the heart rate exercise. Nowadays, there's more of a focus on the high intensity interval training, and today, we're even going to hear about some studies that involve very, very short bursts, so-called sprints of activity, as short as six seconds long, followed by a period of rest, repeated for a number of times, and exploring what the effect of that sort of, I should say, very, very short intensity exercise is on immediate and long-term brain health and performance. The other category of exercise we're going to talk about today is resistance training. Now, most of the studies involving resistance training and their effects on the brain, both brain longevity and brain performance, focus on either compound, so multi-joint movements, so think squats, deadlifts, bench press, shoulder press, dips, et cetera, but very often, and this is just a byproduct of how studies are done in the laboratory, very often, the exploration of the relationship between resistance training and brain health and longevity are single-joint isolation exercises, like a single-leg leg extension, even. You might be thinking, wait, just one leg doing the leg extension? Yes. The reason for that, and I spoke to some of the scientists that do this sort of work, is that when they have subjects do a, say, seated single-leg leg extension as the form of resistance training, I know I and some of you are probably chuckling, like, really? Of all the things you could select to see if it impacts brain health, you're going to have people kick up one knee. Yep, you do that. Why? Well, most people can do that type of movement. It doesn't take any training, or it just takes a little bit of direction as to how to do it, so it can be done reasonably safely by many people, including people that are non-athletes, often older than 65 years old, not that there aren't some very fit 65-year-olds, but just people who are older than 65, but don't have a lot of athletic background, can sit down in a chair, put the pin at the appropriate weight, and move their knee, or rather, elevate their foot while seated in a chair, so-called single-leg leg extension, and also it gives the benefit of the opposite leg within subject control for comparison, in terms of strength increases. We also see studies that involve compound exercises, so having people do free-weight squats, or even weighted squats, or deadlifts, or, you know, bench-press-dip-deadlift-type combinations. Again, when you look at the literature exploring exercise and brain health, and keep in mind that most of the studies exploring the relationship between exercise and brain health and performance are done to explore two types of changes, either what are called acute changes, meaning immediate changes, so they have people do the exercise, and then they have them take a cognitive test, or some other form of test that analyzes brain health and performance, or they look at chronic effects, which are, what are the changes in brain performance and health over long periods of time, meaning having people do a particular type of exercise anywhere from two to four times per week, although typically it's three times per week, and doing that for anywhere from four weeks to six months. So, if by now you're thinking this is really complicated, how is it that we're supposed to tease out the best things to do, given this huge ball of barbed wire of different types of studies, variables, et cetera, well, I assure you, we are going to make this very clear and very actionable, and the thing to keep in mind is that fortunately, 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-second 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. 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. It can be a working memory task, so remembering a short string of numbers, or it could be math problems, it could be the Stroop task, any number of different tasks reveal the same thing, which is that the longer duration, lower-intensity cardio also significantly improves performance. 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 meta-analyses 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. Okay, so now we've established the elevated levels of autonomic arousal, either during or after, and indeed also before a bout 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. So what this means is wonderful. 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 five or six 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 workday, school day, family obligations, et cetera, 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 forms, 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. Okay, so if you're right at the threshold of about to be overwhelmed by the number of different mechanisms by which exercise improves brain function and health, we are, however, going to talk about the practical steps that you can take to make sure that you're getting the most brain benefits from your exercise. Based on what we've talked about so far, here are the four things that I believe everyone should be doing every single week in terms of their exercise program. The first thing is to include at least one workout per week that is of a long, slow distance nature. So zone two type cardio, maybe you get a little bit up into zone three, but basically jogging, swimming, rowing, any activity that you can carry out consistently for 45 to 75 minutes without getting injured, right? People always say, well, do I have to run? No, if you don't like running and running's too hard on your body, or you'll get injured, then do something else. Maybe you do the rower, maybe you ride a stationary bike, maybe you ride a road bike. The second thing is to include at least one workout per week that's of the so-called high intensity interval training type. Now, there are a lot of different types of high intensity interval training out there. In fact, Dr. Andy Galpin says, you know, we'll hear about, say like the four by four by four protocol, right? Four minutes of going as hard as you can for four minutes, basically where there's no variation in the intensity through that whole four minutes, you're going hard the whole four minutes, but only as hard as you can for the entire four minutes, then resting four minutes and then repeating that four by four cycle four times. So that's one way to do it. But Dr. Andy Galpin would be the first to tell you that you probably also get great results from a three by three by four type of workout or a six by six by six type of workout. Although for many people, that's going to be too much and too intense. Or if you're me and you prefer a high intensity interval training session that is more like a two minutes on as hard as you can go for two minutes and then rest for say three to four minutes and then repeat maybe four times, maybe five times, well then do that. The third would be TUT, T-U-T, time under tension. If you're doing resistance training, and I do believe everybody should be doing resistance training, there are a near infinite number of different ways to do resistance training. As you well know, you can move the weight ballistically, you can control the eccentric, you can do any number of different things, but some proportion of the exercises that you do during your resistance training during the week should include time under tension training, where you're really emphasizing the contraction of the muscles, the slow lowering of the weight, as well as the lifting of the weight, contracting the muscles as hard as you can. And this is really to emphasize the nerve to muscle pathways and the way that time under tension promotes the release of things from muscles into the bloodstream that can positively impact the brain, as well as the way that focusing your brain on exercises such that you're isolating muscles, or even if you're not doing a so-called isolation exercise, maybe you're doing a compound exercise like a dip or a squat or a deadlift, but that really concentrating on the muscles that are supposed to be managing the work and not just moving the weight, but challenging the muscles, this very important thing, challenging the muscles, using the weight, not lifting weights or moving weights. By focusing on time under tension, you will of course get benefits as it relates to hypertrophy and strength increases in particular hypertrophy. And then the fourth category of exercise that I believe everybody should include in their existing workouts or add if you're not currently working out is some sort of explosive jumping and or eccentric landing. Now the explosive jumping with eccentric landing, you could do on a mat, right? Most people won't do it on concrete because they're worried about impact, that sort of thing. But let's say you have some mats or you're on a lawn or you're on dirt, jumping up onto a box as high as you can, and then jumping down and controlling the eccentric portion. Again, pick something that you can do safely, progress slowly, right? If you're going to jump up and off boxes, you want to start with low boxes, but that loading of the skeleton through eccentric movement and controlling the descent, super important, not just for your body, not just to avoid falls, not just to improve coordination and a bunch of other great things, but also to get that release of osteocalcin, the improvements in BDNF, brain performance, brain health, and so on.