Seniors: Can Exercise Make Your Brain Your Brain Younger?

Can exercise make your brain younger? Hi, my name is Doug. I've been a physical therapist for 30 years and I specialize in helping people with balance problems learn to walk again. A recent 2026 study that was done on 126 people showed that exercise can actually make your brain about one year younger. I found this study to be very interesting and I was intrigued by what the results were. What they did was they had participants do about two hours of exercise a week. So every week they were doing about 150 minutes of exercise and they used an MRI to try to figure out, a brain scan, to try to figure out what the person's actual biological age was. So you know there's chronological age which is how old you really are and biological age which is how old you appear based on certain measures. So the MRI was able to look at the brain and say you know this is what a typical brain looks like that's 45 years old or 50 years old, was basically rating what the person's biological age was based on certain markers. And what they found was that doing this type of exercise, two hours of aerobic exercise a week over the course of a year, actually made the people in that study about one year younger biologically than the people that were in the control where they didn't do that exercise. And really all this means is something that we've probably all suspected is that exercise does make you younger but it actually does it in this study by improving your brain function. So this is not reversing dementia or anything like that but what it does do is it just makes your brain healthier. And what you should think is you know if as little as one year of doing this has that profound of an effect on the brain that an MRI can actually detect the difference, imagine if you did a little more exercise and you combine that with a healthy diet and you did it for more than a year, it really is possible to make yourself younger just with exercise. I'm going to show you a couple of exercises that I think are really beneficial. Now this study that I'm talking about, it really looked at aerobic exercise but there are exercises that you can do if you're not able to do an aerobic exercise. These are exercises that you can do that will get your heart rate up, that will improve your balance as well as your heart function and they really could be part of a program to kind of get you back in shape so hopefully you can feel younger too. So here are the two exercises I'm going to show you right now. To do single leg stands you want to have a chair that's pretty sturdy. You want to shift all your weight to one side while you're holding the chair then let go and try to put all your weight on one leg balancing for as long as possible. The goal of this exercise is to try to stand on each leg for about 20 seconds without holding on but for most people with balance problems this is a really big challenge. The biggest and most common mistake is that when they let go they immediately fall back down. The way to stop this is to lean more onto the leg that you're standing on. So if you're standing on your right leg you want to lean as far to the right as you possibly can before you let go of the chair. It becomes easier when your weight is further over the leg you're standing on. Definitely the biggest problem is that people just don't weight shift enough and that's why this exercise is so helpful in teaching you how to weight shift. It also allows you to practice balancing on one leg which is actually required when you're walking on unsteady ground or when you're stepping up onto something. Your ability to stand on one leg is really important to having good balance. To do backwards walking you want to have a chair or countertop to hold on to and another chair to sit down on if you get tired. What you want to do is just stand straight and then take three steps in one direction backwards then turn around facing the chair and turn around and go in the other direction three steps. The reason why you only want to take three steps is you don't want to get too far away from the chair. If you're having trouble with your balance backwards walking is a great way to challenge your balance and improve your ability to walk but if you're doing this exercise you're also probably worried about your stability and the potential to fall so you really want to stay close to the chair while you're doing this exercise. Now you want to keep going back and forth. I usually time myself for two minutes when I'm doing this exercise with clients so that they can rest anytime they want within the two minutes but I try to encourage them to keep trying to walk for the entire two minutes. If you're tired you can sit down you can also either hold the chair or not hold the chair. The goal for this exercise is to do this two or three times without holding the chair in a row so if you can do that then you probably don't need to keep working on this exercise but most people that are watching this you'll need to hold the chair in the beginning and then over time you can slowly start to let go of the chair making it a little bit harder on yourself. Now it's important that you're not shuffling your feet when you do this exercise. You want to pick your foot up and really lift it back. It's almost like you're stepping over something when you're doing the exercise. Don't just shuffle your feet back. This is a great opportunity to practice weight shifting and really lifting your leg up high behind you. Not only does this improve backwards walking which is something that a lot of people don't practice but it actually also improves your forward walking. By doing this backwards it actually reinforces all the skills you need to walk forward correctly. I hope you found this video helpful. Click the subscribe button if you want to see more videos like this.