Fitness
As a woman, I used to be afraid of lifting weights. Now, I’m proud to be ‘jacked’
A childhood with an emphasis on skinnyI have no recollection of the term “strength training” growing up. I entered high school in 2006 and threw myself into cross-country running, where slender was the ideal body type. The petite stars of “The Hills” and “Gossip Girl” covered CosmoGirl and Seventeen next to “get bikini-ready” headlines, and judges on “America’s Next Top Model” scrutinized women’s bodies on national TV.
Instead of weight-lifting, I was focused on squeezing into a pair of low-rise jeans from Delia’s.
The only time I recall lifting a weight as a teen was on a gym date with a guy from school. He showed me how to do a barbell bench press and dripped sweat on me while spotting me.
If this was a woman’s experience trying to lift weights, I wanted nothing to do with it. Plus, with no resources or role models showcasing the benefits of getting strong, I assumed that it only led to a muscular upper body, the total opposite of what I was seeing in my magazines.
The truth is strength training can improve bone, heart and brain health, boost your metabolism, preserve quality of life as you age, reduce the risk of disease and more. But even if I knew all this when I was younger, I still probably would’ve avoided it, given the mental images strength training conjured.
One of the first-known female pioneers in weightlifting was Abbye “Pudgy” Stockton, credited for popularizing Santa Monica’s Muscle Beach with her husband in the 1930s and ‘40s, per the Los Angeles Times. But it wasn’t until the ‘80s that women and weightlifting become more mainstream, after Arnold Schwarzenegger put bodybuilding on the map when he appeared in the 1977 documentary “Pumping Iron,” per the New York Times.
From there, Lisa Lyons, Carla Dunlap, Rachel McLish and more bodybuilders emerged in the ’80s, and before long, gyms were turning co-ed.
Fast-forward to the 2000s, and at-home DVD workouts that focused on building strength became bestsellers, like Tony Horton’s P90X and Jillian Michael’s “Shred” workouts. CrossFit also rose to stardom and introduced women and men alike to strength training (with some injuries along the way).
By 2010, when I started college, I still didn’t see myself in strength training. Doing a workout DVD in my dorm room wasn’t practical, and CrossFit felt beyond my skillset. After I gained the freshman 15, I became hawk-eyed on weight loss. My senior year, I picked up running again, and after graduation, I ran my first half marathon.
After the race, when I combed through professional photos, one caught my attention. I thought my arms looked strong. I purchased it and made it my profile picture on Facebook. Years later, friends and family told me that photo concerned them because of how thin I was.
In 2017, I started working as a social media editor at a health and fitness magazine, and I wrote a before-and-after about my 40-pound weight loss dating back to college. After it published, I did what all the editors warned me not to: look at the comments. It was a mixed bag, but one that bluntly stated I looked better in the before image burned into my mind.
I got into the New York City Marathon that same year, so I added more miles to my runs. I ignored advice that I should cross-train and stuck to hitting the pavement, with the occasional spin or Barry’s class. I was all in on legs, and that seemed to work for me up until that point — why would I do otherwise?
I kept running, with the perception that beauty and skinny went hand in hand.
A gateway into strength training
When the pandemic hit in March 2020, my now-husband, Sam, and I retreated to his parents’ for a few months. At first, running was my sanctuary, but it became lonely. I turned to social media and joined live workouts led by fitness instructors and studio owners.
In no time, I was doing one or two a day in the basement that became my makeshift gym. I started sharing workout reviews on my Instagram to help others looking for a sense of semi-normalcy.
Some classes encouraged using weights, and my future father-in-law had a set of adjustable iron-plated dumbbells. “I’ll just use the 5-pounder,” I thought to myself. I never increased the load, but choosing to reach for anything was new for me.
Around the same time, thought of teaching fitness crept into my mind. While we were hunkering down, I yearned to progress forward, so I enrolled in an online course to become a certified group fitness instructor in July 2020. I shared the news on Instagram with a flex.
Eventually, Sam and I moved back into our own space, where I balanced my classes with 5-pound workouts.
Addressing my fear of being ‘jacked’
In January 2021, I passed my group fitness instructor test from my bedroom. I asked Sam to take a picture, and as he snapped away, a realization struck me as quickly as hips driving a kettlebell into the air: I could no longer be afraid of going heavier — if not for me, for the people I teach.
I started teaching free HIIT classes on Zoom to friends, family and any Instagram followers who wanted in. A year later, I landed a part-time gig as an instructor at a new boxing and strength studio, where I was demoing exercises, correcting form, navigating lights and music, providing motivational cues and leading by example by grabbing heavier weights.
Fitness
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While exercise is known to improve memory, scientists have mostly studied this effect by using behavioral tests or brain imaging methods like MRIs, says Michelle Voss, PhD, one of the study’s authors, a professor, and the director of the Health, Brain, and Cognitive Lab at the University of Iowa in Iowa City.
But she says these approaches can’t precisely identify where “ripples” originate, particularly in the deep brain structures like the hippocampus, a part of the brain strongly connected to memory and learning, she says.
The current study, published in Brain Communications, recorded electrical activity directly, using surgically implanted (intracranial) electrodes. “This allowed us to observe how exercise changes the brain’s memory circuits in real time,” Dr. Voss says.
20-Minute Bursts of Exercise Increase Brain Ripples
The participants performed a 5-minute warm-up and then rode a stationary bike for 20 minutes at a pace they could maintain. Researchers recorded their brain activity before and after the biking session.
The electrodes showed an increased rate of so-called sharp-wave ripples from the hippocampus and connections with cortical regions of the brain, which are involved in learning and memory.
“Sharp-wave ripples have long been known from animal studies to play a central role in memory,” Voss says, adding that recent studies using intracranial recordings in humans also support the importance of ripples for human memory.
“Our findings are the first to show that exercise can modulate these ripple signals in the human brain,” she says.
Researchers also observed that larger increases in heart rate during exercise were associated with larger changes in ripple activity in cortical networks, Voss adds.
What’s Already Known About Exercise, Memory, and Learning
Exercise helps build connections between neurons, which deepens and strengthens brain networks, Franssen says.
Physical activity also improves metabolism, which improves insulin sensitivity, helping blood sugar regulation and giving the brain a “more stable and reliable supply of fuel,” Dr. Perlmutter says.
“This is critically important because the brain is an energy-intensive organ, consuming roughly 20 percent of the body’s energy despite representing only a small fraction of body weight,” he adds.
The Research Has Limitations
Voss says researchers were careful to “exclude signals that contained epileptic activity. However, of course, we can’t statistically control for the accumulated effects of having epilepsy on the brain.”
The exercise-brain ripple patterns observed in the current study also closely match those observed in healthy adults using noninvasive brain imaging, such as MRI, she added.
“That convergence across very different methods is one of the strongest indicators that the effects are not specific to epilepsy, but reflect a more general human brain response to exercise,” Voss said.
Researchers also didn’t directly test memory performance, Voss notes. “While hippocampal ripples are strongly linked to memory processing in decades of neuroscience research, the next step will be to measure how exercise-related changes in ripples relate to memory performance in the same individuals.”
Future studies should also compare exercise with other everyday activities, such as sitting quietly or light movement, to determine how specific these effects are to aerobic exercise at the intensity that was studied, she says.
Satisfy Your Brain’s Exercise Craving
It’s never too early or too late to start exercising for brain health, Franssen says.
People of any age, from grade-school children to people in their nineties, can benefit from increased physical activity, Perlmutter says. “My recommendation is to consider taking advantage of the connection between physical activity and brain health across the entire range of human aging.”
Any type of exercise is great, Franssen says, but especially “repetitive behaviors,” like swimming, jogging, and walking.
“Sometimes we let the hugeness of putting in a huge fitness routine get in our way,” she says. “Having a little exercise snack every so often is also very important to improving cognition.”
Increasing our level of physical fitness leads to a bigger release of brain-boosting proteins following one session of exercise, a new study led by a UCL researcher has found.
The study, published in Brain Research, took a group of inactive unfit participants through a 12-week training programme of cycling three times per week and made them fitter. Researchers found as their fitness increased, so did the amount of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) released following exercise, resulting in improved brain function.
Just 15 minutes of moderate to vigorous aerobic exercise releases BDNF, a brain protein which is known to support the formation of new neurons and new synapses (connections between brain cells), and maintains the health of existing neurons. This is the first study to show that for unfit people, just 12 weeks of consistent training can boost the brain’s response to a single 15-minute workout.
The study, led by Dr Flaminia Ronca (UCL Surgery & Interventional Science, and the Institute of Sport, Exercise and Health), involved 30 participants – 23 male and seven female – taking part in the 12-week programme. To assess fitness levels throughout the programme, participants completed VO2max tests every six weeks, which measures the maximum rate of oxygen your body can consume and use during intense exercise.
BDNF levels were measured pre- and post-VO2max testing, alongside a series of cognitive and memory tests, while also measuring changes in brain activity in the prefrontal cortex – where executive functions such as decision-making, emotion regulation, attention and impulsivity are controlled.
By the final week of the trial, results showed that baseline levels of BDNF did not change, but participants did show a larger spike of BDNF following intense exercise, compared to how their brains responded to intense exercise before the 12-week programme. This was linked to improvements in VO2max (aerobic fitness).
Higher overall BDNF levels and stronger exercise-induced increases were also associated with changes in activity across key areas of the prefrontal cortex during attention and inhibition tasks, though not during memory tasks.
Overall, the results showed that increasing physical fitness can enhance the brain’s ability to produce BDNF in response to acute bouts of exercise, which can have a strong positive influence on neural activity.
Lead author Dr Flaminia Ronca said: “We’ve known for a while that exercise is good for our brain, but the mechanisms through which this occurs are still being disentangled. The most exciting finding from our study is that if we become fitter, our brains benefit even more from a single session of exercise, and this can change in only six weeks.”
Notes to editors:
For more information or to speak to the researchers involved, please contact: Tom Cramp, UCL Media Relations , T: +447586 711698, E: [email protected]
The research paper: ‘BDNF relates to prefrontal cortex activity in the context of physical exercise’, Flaminia Ronca, Cian Xu, Ellen Kong, Dennis Chan, Antonia Hamilton, Giampietro Schiavo, Ilias Tachtsidis, Paola Pinti, Benjamin Tari, Tom Gurney, Paul W. Burgess, is published in Brain Research, March 2026,
About UCL (University College London)
UCL is a diverse global community of world-class academics, students, industry links, external partners, and alumni. Our powerful collective of individuals and institutions work together to explore new possibilities.
Since 1826, we have championed independent thought by attracting and nurturing the world’s best minds. Our community of more than 50,000 students from 150 countries and over 16,000 staff pursues academic excellence, breaks boundaries and makes a positive impact on real world problems.
We are consistently ranked among the top 10 universities in the world and are one of only a handful of institutions rated as having the strongest academic reputation and the broadest research impact.
We have a progressive and integrated approach to our teaching and research – championing innovation, creativity and cross-disciplinary working. We teach our students how to think, not what to think, and see them as partners, collaborators and contributors.
For 200 years, we are proud to have opened higher education to students from a wide range of backgrounds and to change the way we create and share knowledge.
We were the first in England to welcome women to university education and that courageous attitude and disruptive spirit is still alive today. We are UCL.
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Journal
Brain Research
DOI
10.1016/j.brainres.2026.150253
Method of Research
Experimental study
Subject of Research
People
Article Title
BDNF relates to prefrontal cortex activity in the context of physical exercise
Article Publication Date
4-Mar-2026
Media Contact
Tom Cramp
University College London
[email protected]
Journal
Brain Research
DOI
10.1016/j.brainres.2026.150253
Journal
Brain Research
DOI
10.1016/j.brainres.2026.150253
Method of Research
Experimental study
Subject of Research
People
Article Title
BDNF relates to prefrontal cortex activity in the context of physical exercise
Article Publication Date
4-Mar-2026
Tags
/Health and medicine/Human health/Physical exercise
bu içeriği en az 2000 kelime olacak şekilde ve alt başlıklar ve madde içermiyecek şekilde ünlü bir science magazine için İngilizce olarak yeniden yaz. Teknik açıklamalar içersin ve viral olacak şekilde İngilizce yaz. Haber dışında başka bir şey içermesin. Haber içerisinde en az 12 paragraf ve her bir paragrafta da en az 50 kelime olsun. Cevapta sadece haber olsun. Ayrıca haberi yazdıktan sonra içerikten yararlanarak aşağıdaki başlıkların bilgisi var ise haberin altında doldur. Eğer yoksa bilgisi ilgili kısmı yazma.:
Subject of Research:
Article Title:
News Publication Date:
Web References:
References:
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Keywords
Tags: 12-week cycling training program benefitsbrain plasticity and physical fitnessbrain-derived neurotrophic factor after exerciseeffects of aerobic exercise on BDNFexercise and neuron healthexercise-induced neurogenesisfitness level impact on brain proteinsfitness training for cognitive improvementimproving brain function through fitnessmoderate to vigorous aerobic exercise effectsphysical fitness and brain healthVO2max and brain function correlation
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