Fitness
How to invest 3% of your day in exercise to live longer, according to an expert in healthy aging
Investing just 3% of your time each day in exercise could help you live a longer, healthier life, a physiologist told Business Insider.
Nathan K. LeBrasseur, director of the Robert and Arlene Kogod Center on Aging at Mayo Clinic, researches healthy aging. He said that “the greatest threats to human health today are lifestyle-related conditions” such as cardiovascular and lung diseases, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and cancer.
Such lifestyle-related conditions account for almost three-quarters of deaths worldwide each year, according to the World Health Organization — 17 million of which happen before the age of 70.
Dedicating some time to a healthy, active lifestyle when you’re young can help to prevent or delay these conditions, LeBrasseur said.
Some might be disappointed that there’s no secret to healthy aging, no matter how much money “biohackers” throw at the problem. But LeBrasseur said this “should really be viewed as an incredible opportunity that you have such control over your health and wellbeing.”
He shared the smartest way to invest your time to stay healthy.
Spend 3% of your day exercising
Investing 3% of your income sounds like a “minimal financial
investment,” LeBrasseur said.
Similarly, investing just 3% of your day in exercise is “a minimal investment to have a profound impact on our overall health,” he said.
Nitat Termmee/Getty Images
This works out at around 30 minutes of a typical 16-hour day that should be spent doing moderate to vigorous exercise, he said.
Moderate exercise should make you feel “on the verge of being a little short of breath,” he said, or is a five or a six out of 10 in terms of effort. Vigorous exercise, meanwhile, is more of an eight or nine out of 10 and should make you actively fatigued.
Depending on your fitness level, this could involve walking, lifting weights, running, cycling, or swimming.
The type of exercise matters
LeBrasseur recommended doing a mixture of resistance and aerobic exercises — aerobic for cardiovascular, brain, metabolic, and pulmonary health, and resistance to maintain physical function and prevent frailty in older age.
One 2022 study showed that doing both resistance training and aerobic exercise appeared to reduce participants’ risk of dying from any cause by 32%.
HIIT, or high-intensity interval training, is a good “twofer,” LeBrasseur said, because it features both resistance and aerobic exercises. With HIIT, “you’re definitely taxing your cardiovascular system as well as your musculoskeletal and neuromuscular systems, and there is a clear benefit to that,” he said.
Functional training, featuring squats, lunges, and pulling/pushing exercises, is also beneficial for healthy aging, he said, as it can strengthen the muscles needed to preserve mobility and physical function in older age.
Don’t just be active at the gym
“Being more habitually active and having fewer rest periods during the day is highly beneficial” for health and longevity, LeBrasseur said.
He recommended adding bits of exercise into the day wherever you can — whether that’s parking the car further from your destination, getting up to speak to colleagues instead of emailing them, or going to the grocery store instead of getting a delivery.
Consider when you don’t move, too, he said. If you work a sedentary job, he suggested getting up from your desk every hour to walk for 10 minutes or doing some pushups or squats.
Start ASAP and pick something you enjoy
“Sooner is always better,” LeBrasseur said. “It’s never too late. Even for 90 year olds, there’s strong evidence that exercise can have clear health benefits on preserving function and preventing exacerbation of disease.”
But the most important thing about physical activity and exercise is consistency, he said. So, pick an activity that you enjoy and can do regularly to reap the benefits.
LeBrasseur runs, bikes, and swims, but said people shouldn’t try to copy him or anyone else. “The point is that I do these things because I really enjoy them and can be consistent with them. If you asked me to do another activity that I had zero interest in, I might do it for a week but then I’d drop off,” he said.
Combining exercise with socializing can also make regular exercise easier because it’s more enjoyable, plus your friends can hold you accountable.
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)
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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.:
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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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