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Fitness
How Many Minutes of Exercise Daily You Need for Memory Health
Whereas it’s frequent data that there are lots of advantages of train, the excellent news is you don’t have to carry out high-intensity exercises to reap the psychological well being rewards.
In line with a brand new examine, the consequences of bodily exercise on mind quantity had been most pronounced at low bodily exercise ranges. Research authors word that merely strolling quarter-hour per day or taking the steps as a substitute of the elevator can have a constructive impression on the mind. Outcomes means that making small modifications like this and interesting in average train will work wonders in terms of preserving your thoughts sharp.
The Connection Between Mind Well being and Train
Bodily exercise is helpful to your general well being, together with cognitive operate.
“You’re a genetic engineer, and what you do modifications which genes are turned on or off in your physique,” says Michael Roizen, MD, chief wellness officer emeritus on the Cleveland Clinic, founding father of the Reboot Your Age app, and writer of The Nice Age Reboot: Cracking the Longevity Code for a Youthful Tomorrow. “Bodily exercise that stresses muscle tissue is not simply good to your coronary heart, blood vessels or muscle tissue however it additionally activates a gene in your muscle tissue that produces irisin that crosses the blood-brain barrier and will increase your mind’s reminiscence heart dimension and connections.”
Due to this fact, doing common bodily exercise you want (if you happen to don’t love strolling, you possibly can play along with your children or grandkids—whether or not it’s ping pong or no matter you love to do) reduces stress, will increase metabolisms, and improves coronary heart and lung features.
Nonetheless, probably essentially the most underrated good thing about bodily health is its impression on mind well being, Dr. Roizen provides. When a person will get constant bodily exercise, analysis exhibits that the hippocampus, the a part of the mind liable for studying and reminiscence, advantages and cognition improves.
Associated: Want Extra Motivation to Train? Right here Are Six Psychological Advantages
John Gardner, co-founder and CEO of Kickoff, says one of many best strategies of including train to your each day routine is performing each day duties in a extra wholesome method.
“This will embody climbing the steps as a substitute of taking the elevator, biking to work and even going grocery buying on foot. This helps be sure that you carry out bodily exercise in your each day routine with out having to allocate time and power in the direction of exercising,” says Gardner.
You may as well stroll and speak.
(scroll to maintain studying)
One other glorious tip that may be very easy to observe is pacing whereas talking on the telephone or throughout digital conferences.
As an alternative of sitting in entrance of a display screen or at a desk throughout a gathering, you possibly can take a name or digital assembly on a cell gadget and stroll during the assembly, Gardner states. You will be stunned to search out you’ve got gotten greater than 10,000 steps in per day and managed so as to add them throughout your work day with out placing within the additional effort.
Methods To Enhance Your Cognitive Perform
Here is what else Dr. Roizen recommends to positively impression your mind well being:
Get at the least 10,000 steps in each day or the equal of that
The equal is roughly one minute of bodily exercise, similar to biking, which equals 100 steps. Analysis exhibits that sedentary individuals 55 and older with issue concentrating, making selections, or remembering can reverse the clock by about 9 years by doing cardio train, like strolling or biking, for 35 minutes 3 times per week. So, get shifting!
Incorporate intense exercise that can spike your coronary heart charge
Including extra intense exercises helps activate that gene that produces irisin which then releases a protein referred to as BDNF, a brain-derived neurotrophic issue that grows your hippocampus. For my older people, slowly construct cardio into your health plan and work along with your physician to search out what may give you the results you want.
Cardio train
This consists of working, swimming or biking, with sufficient depth to extend your coronary heart charge 3 times per week for 20 minutes to at the least 80 p.c of your age-adjusted most coronary heart charge (roughly 220 minus your age for each women and men) has proven to decreases incapacity, dementia and even loss of life.
However bodily exercise shouldn’t be the one factor to do for good mind well being.
Mind video games
Spend 5 to 10 minutes a day participating with video games to problem the thoughts. When the mind is constantly working with technique, logic and puzzles, whether or not by means of train or velocity of processing mind video games, it fosters the expansion of neurons, connections and the hippocampus.
Subsequent up: Eight Reminiscence-Boosting Tips to Gas Your Recall
Sources
- Neurology: “Affiliation Between Accelerometer-Derived Bodily Exercise Measurements and Mind Construction”
- Michael Roizen, MD, chief wellness officer emeritus on the Cleveland Clinic, founding father of the Reboot Your Age app, and writer of The Nice Age Reboot: Cracking the Longevity Code for a Youthful Tomorrow
- John Gardner, co-founder and CEO of Kickoff
Fitness
Fitness: Is mindfulness the key to a more enjoyable workout?
If exercise pushes you so far outside your comfort zone that physical activity is associated with pain more than pleasure, there’s little motivation to get off the couch.
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There’s no shortage of rumination about why more than half of Canadians don’t meet the recommended 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity per week. Lack of time is a common excuse, but there are plenty of busy people who exercise regularly. Access is another often-stated barrier, though most Canadians can safely exercise outdoors or in the privacy of their own home should other fitness facilities not be within an easy commute.
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What’s often ignored is the role enjoyment plays in exercise adherence. For those who revel in a tough workout, the idea some people hate to sweat may seem strange. But if exercise pushes you so far outside your comfort zone that physical activity is associated with pain more than pleasure, there’s little motivation to get off the couch.
Once exercise becomes coupled with discomfort, getting reluctant exercisers to find pleasure and enjoyment in physical activity is an uphill battle. To help improve its appeal, researchers have been looking at the effectiveness of something called “extrinsic strategies” to promote better exercise adherence. Defined as “environmental manipulations of the exercise experience that fall outside of the FITT principles,” extrinsic strategies are more about the mental, rather than physical aspects of exercise. In short, the focus is less about the frequency, intensity, time and type of exercise, and more about the role feelings play in the adoption of a regular workout routine.
To be clear, we’re not talking about taking the effort out of exercise. Extrinsic strategies work on altering the perception of effort. Even more granular, it’s important to alter how effort is perceived during, not after, a workout. There’s a marked difference in how people feel once they wipe the sweat off their brow compared to when they’re grinding it out just hoping to finish. And while some people use the feeling of accomplishment that comes after a tough workout to motivate their return to the gym, others can’t get past the memory of how uncomfortable it felt in the moment.
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One of the extrinsic strategies to improving the exercise experience is focusing on external stimuli instead of how the body feels. Music is a popular distraction, which is why so many exercisers listen to their favourite playlists. Another option is exercising outdoors where nature works its magic at diverting exercisers from the internal sensations of effort. Exercising with a friend or within a group also helps. But contrary to using external distractions to dampen the effort of exercise, is the novel idea of leaning into how your body feels during a tough workout.
Mindfulness is defined as paying attention to what’s happening in the moment while also being open to how the body responds physically and mentally to the current experience. In other words, instead of trying to disassociate from the feelings of effort, mindfulness aims to accept and acknowledge the exertion it takes to complete a workout.
The idea that mindfulness is effective at improving exercise adherence is gaining traction, with initial studies suggesting it has merit, but mostly when exercising at lower intensities. Learning to accept and become comfortable with the feelings associated with physical exertion could be a crucial first step in finding pleasure in exercise.
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A recent study published in the Journal of Sports Sciences recently tested the effectiveness of mindfulness in enhancing the exercise experience. The goal of the research team was to see if mindfulness “could prove a useful pleasure enhancing strategy during exercise.”
A test sample of 34 recreationally active men and women were divided into two groups. One group was equipped with a recording taken from Headspace, a popular meditation and mindfulness app, that focused exercisers on tuning into their body and its movement. The control group was without any mindfulness tools.
Both sets of exercisers were asked to follow a 1.5-mile loop through a local park at a self-selected intensity they could sustain for 20-25 minutes. Heart rate was continually monitored, and study subjects were asked to check in with how they felt at two points during the walk (at 0.5 and one mile).
Results indicated listening to a mindfulness recording led to a more pleasurable exercise experience than walking the loop without. That positive response to exercise continued after the workout finished, another sign the mindfulness guided walk produced the kind of enjoyment that could encourage exercisers to walk more often.
Learning to appreciate the feelings associated with effort is an interesting strategy to introduce, especially to new exercisers who often negatively perceive the physical sensations that occur during a workout. With more practice accepting, instead of tuning out, those feelings, a greater number of novice exercisers could become more tolerant of the effort required to improve overall fitness. It’s also an interesting approach for seasoned exercisers who generally rely on disassociating from the intense feelings of a hard workout.
Acknowledging, accepting and appreciating the effort of being physically active are tools every exerciser can lean into when the going gets tough. More importantly, it could be part an improved strategy to get more Canadians enjoying the 150 minutes a week they spend working up a sweat.
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Fitness
‘WH’ Editors Put These Fitness Gifts On Their Wishlist
Jasmine Gomez is the Commerce Editor at Women’s Health, where she cover the best product recommendations across beauty, health, lifestyle, fitness, and more. When she’s not shopping for a living, she enjoys karaoke and dining out more than she cares to admit. Follow her @JazzeGomez.
Mark Stock is a food, drink, and outdoors writer from Portland, Oregon. He spent years making, selling, and sipping Pinot Noir in the Dundee Hills before a full return to his journalistic roots in 2016. In addition to Men’s Health, he writes for SevenFifty Daily, Sip Northwest, The Somm Journal, The Drake, Willamette Week, Travel Oregon, and more.
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Fitness
This type of exercise suppresses hunger in women more than men, study proves
Find yourself with a bigger appetite on rest days than after logging your hardest workout of the week? Same. It usually takes me an hour or two to feel hunger after an intense session, and while there are plenty of existing studies that have attributed this to a decrease in the hunger hormone grehlin and an increase in the hormone peptide YY, which helps you feel fuller for longer, new research suggests women are more susceptible to this response than men.
Granted, the study was conducted on only a small sample of participants (eight males and six females), but this is the first review to have included women at all, and the findings were notable.
The method was pretty straightforward: participants were asked to fast overnight, before completing bouts of cycling at varying levels of intensity the next morning. These were then followed up with blood tests (to measure amounts of lactate) and self-reports to analyse appetite levels.
Results showed that the females had higher levels of total ghrelin (the hormone that makes you feel hunger) at baseline compared to the males, while they also had ‘significantly reduced levels’ of acylated (AG) ghrelin after intense exercise compared to males. Ghrelin levels were, in fact, much lower in both males and females after intense exercise compared to moderate exercise, meaning that all participants felt ‘less hungry’ after high-intensity exercise compared to after moderate exercise, but this was even more significant for women.
‘We found that moderate intensity exercise either did not change ghrelin levels or led to a net increase,’ the study noted. The authors added that exercise above your lactate threshold may be necessary to elicit a suppression in grehlin. Lactate threshold is the point at which lactate builds up in your bloodstream faster than your body can remove it – it occurs during high-intensity exercise.
Why is this useful to know? The author of the study, Kara Anderson, PhD, says: ‘Our research suggests that high-intensity exercise may be important for appetite suppression, which can be particularly useful as part of a weight loss programme. Exercise should be thought of as a “drug”, where the “dose” should be customised based on an individual’s personal goals.’
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Bridie is Fitness Director at Women’s Health UK. She spends her days sweating over new workouts, fitness launches and the best home gym kit so you have all that you need to get fit done. Her work has been published in Stylist, Glamour, Cosmopolitan and more. She’s also a part-time yoga teacher with a habit of nodding off mid savasana (not when she’s teaching, promise).
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