Fitness
‘We’ve moved past aesthetics’: why middle-aged women are outnumbering the gym bunnies
Call it the revenge of the middle-class, middle-aged women.
A recent report found that women aged between 40 and 50 are doing more exercise than women half their age. According to a UK study by Vitality, one in four women approaching perimenopausal age are doing exercise almost every day. By contrast, a fifth of those aged between 20 and 29 do anywhere near that.
At The Method, a new fitness studio in west London, this rings true. “Some of the women who come here are completely out of shape,” says its CEO, Katie Henderson. “Perhaps they just had a baby, or are trying out exercise for the first time, but they’re not always your typical gym bunnies – and a great deal of them are in their 50s and 60s.”
The exercise studio is small, hot and bathed in a pink light. Standing at the front, an instructor called Julius shouts the word “mobility” at a class of six women. It’s not the first time the 45-year-old former dancer has used this word to motivate. Mobility is a key tenet of yoga, barre and pilates – and Julius’s other job is teaching pilates to The Lion King cast to prevent injury.
But among the high-end gymwear and rose-coloured weights, the word is unexpected. Fitness classes are generally seen as being for the young and lithe – not the middle-aged and immobile. “It is about fitness, yes,” he says. “But it’s also about keeping up bone density, about building strength and about not getting hurt.”
Across all ages, fitness is big business in the UK. From budget gyms such as PureGym and The Gym Group to pricier, class-focused clubs Barry’s, SoulCycle and Frame, the entire industry is expected to reach £2.8bn this year.
The Method is one of a new line of smaller specialised gyms – New York and LA are leading the way – attracting older women.
There is no one method at The Method; rather the barre, pilates and yoga-based classes lean towards dance and having a good time, Henderson says. “But they are also geared towards all ages.”
Pvolve, a pilates-inspired fitness regime, is more about strength and conditioning. In effect an at-home, low-impact resistance workout, it launched five years ago, but since recently placing Jennifer Aniston front and centre of its campaign, it has blown up in the US and is gradually making its way to the UK.
Using a numbered mat, a resistance band and exercise ball, it looks somewhere between Twister and a tax return. But it is marketed at the time-poor, and those who can’t quite bear the idea of going down the gym for “fear of judgment around physical ability or body image”. Capitalising on the success of the post-pandemic “workout-from-home”, classes are run online, the tantalising carrot being the menopausal-yet-honed body of Aniston, 56, who has claimed “this changed her life”.
Josh Davies, a personal trainer who trains the cast of Bridgerton, thinks the motivation for working out is changing. “Five years ago it was about looking lean, but we’ve moved past aesthetics and I’d go as far as to call it a complete switch in mindset,” he says.
Strength training is a “huge focus, particularly of premenopausal, middle-aged women. It’s not something people talked about until recently.”
Most of his clients are over 40. But, while reformer is punishing, and yoga borders on philosophical, he thinks strength conditioning is as much about injury prevention as anything else, “particularly when clients already exercise – or have either just returned to it after having a baby or haven’t done it in a while”. Studies have shown that while strength-training-focused classes can help slow muscle mass and strength deterioration, older adults improve with a trainer.
Late last year, Jane Fonda launched a four-part series of workouts for Supernatural, Meta Quest’s virtual reality (VR) fitness platform, which focuses on strength training. “When you’re younger, working out is a choice,” she told Women’s Health. “When you’re older, working out is an absolute necessity.”
Exercise among the middle-aged has undergone a loose rebranding in the past few years. The NHS guidelines now recommend strengthening activities twice a week for adults up to the age of 64. Ranging from pushing a wheelbarrow to weights and pilates, solid advice about exercise has historically been difficult to separate from the pressure to diet or look slim, says Davies.
The generational shift is partly about time, but – like many classes – are “also because people can’t afford a personal trainer under the age of 40,” he says. Classes at the Method also cost about £35 each. But when you reach a certain age, he says, mobility is the new priority.
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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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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Article Title:
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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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