We’d try anything to improve our genius.
The physical benefits of exercise are well-known and many a gym owner has made bank on our sporadic enthusiasm to be strong and lean. The benefits of exercise to the mind however, are now coming to the fore.
The brains of people who exercise look different to the brains of people who don’t. Physical fitness has been shown to slow down the onset of cognitive conditions like dementia, Parkinson’s disease and depression. Scientists say this is partly because getting your blood pumping brings more oxygen, growth factors, hormones and nutrients to your brain, making it grow stronger and more efficient.
Writing for the New Scientist,Teal Burrell, says doing particular exercises can actually improve your cognitive ability, improve memory, curb cravings, better your decision making and even improve your ability to read maps.
In a study done at the University of British Columbia, researchers found that regular aerobic exercise, the kind that gets your heart and your sweat glands pumping appears to boost the size of the hippocampus, the brain area involved in verbal memory and learning.
According to the study reported on in the New Scientist these particular exercises can help us be that much smarter;
- Yoga helps with memory and information processing, by stimulating the frontal lobe, it improves your ability to integrate thoughts and emotions.
- Interval training helps control your appetite and cravings, exercise like bikram yoga done in high temperatures also reduces the hunger hormone, ghrelin.
- Circuit training, can improve your attention to detail and your ability to switch between tasks with efficiency.
- Regular aerobic exercise, running, swimming, skipping etc, is shown to improve your memory.
- Weight-lifting, just two hours a week, is shown to improve attention span,associative memory and even stave off the effects of Alzheimer’s.
Tomorrow is a good place to start…
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