Exercise Boosts Brain Power

At the encouragement of a friend, I am reading the book, Brain Rules, by John Medina. Just a couple chapters into the book I have encountered information that I simply must share, and this blog seems to be the best way to do so. I feel a series of posts coming on as I mine the valuable nuggets of this book.


Brain Rule #1 – Exercise Boosts Brain Power

We’ve heard a lot about the benefits of exercise for our bodies, but I hadn’t so clearly encountered its benefits for brain power until now. My post titled "Move and Learn" in May addressed the benefit of movement and academics, but this was mostly from the learning style perspective. I’m now armed with even more information regarding the benefits of exercise – or movement – for our brain.

A good bit of research has been done to compare the effects of sedentary and active lifestyles. Exercise can result in sometimes astonishing elevation in cognitive performance compared with those who are sedentary. Exercisers outperform couch potatoes in tests that measure long-term memory, reasoning, attention, and problem-solving. That’s fine, you may be thinking, but that’s not been our habit up to now. Hang on though, all is not lost. When normally sedentary people are enrolled in an aerobic exercise program, all kinds of mental abilities begin to come back online for young or old. In a recent study, children began a program of jogging for 30 minutes 2-3 times a week. After 12 weeks, their cognitive performance had improved significantly compared with pre-jogging levels.

Dr Antronette Yancey’s studies found that exercise improves children. Physically fit children identify visual stimuli much faster than sedentary ones and appear to concentrate better. Brain-activation studies show that children and adolescents who are fit allocate more cognitive resources to a task and do so for longer periods of time.

“Kids pay better attention to their subjects when they’ve been active,” Yancey says. “Kids are less likely to be disruptive in terms of their classroom behavior when they’re active. Kids feel better about themselves, have higher self-esteem, less depression, less anxiety. All of those things can impair academic performance and attentiveness.”

Why exercise works so well on the brain – a brief physiology lesson …

When we eat, the body uses teeth, stomach acid and the intestines to tear the food apart and reconfigure it for absorption. Much of our food is turned into glucose, one of the body’s favorite energy resources, and absorbed into the bloodstream via the small intestines. It is then carried to the body’s cells where cellular chemicals tear apart the molecular structure of glucose to extract its energy. Such fierce activity generates a fair amount of toxic waste, primarily in the form of excess electrons, better known as free radicals. If not quickly corralled, they will wreck havoc on the innards of a cell and thus the body. The main function of oxygen in your body is to act like an efficient electron-absorbing sponge. At the same time the blood is delivering foodstuffs to your tissues, it also carries these oxygen sponges which absorb the electrons and transform them into carbon dioxide which is carried back to the lungs for expulsion from the body. The oxygen-rich air you breathe keeps the food you eat from killing you.

Blood acts as both wait staff and haz-mat team, and any tissue without enough blood supply is going to both starve and be poisoned – including your brain. Though only representing about 2% of the body’s total weight, our brain utilizes 20% of the body’s total energy resources. Improving the blood’s delivery system can improve both the brain’s energy supply and waste removal. Exercise does not provide the oxygen and food – it provides greater access to the oxygen and food. When you exercise, you increase blood flow across tissues of your body. As the flow improves, the body makes new blood vessels, which penetrate deeper and deeper into the tissues of the body. The more you exercise, the more tissues you can feed and the more toxic waste you can remove.

Imaging studies have shown that exercise literally increases blood volume in a region of the brain called the dentate gyrus - a vital constituent of the hippocampus, a region deeply involved in memory formation. Early studies also indicate that exercise also stimulates one of the brain’s most powerful growth factors, BDNF, which exerts a fertilizer-like growth effect on certain neurons in the brain. This protein keeps existing neurons young and healthy, and encourages the formation of new cells in the brain.

After presenting this fascinating lesson on brain physiology, Dr. Medina proposes that classrooms integrate more movement, and that Phys Ed programs be increased rather than eliminated. Might be a little harder to sell this in a large school district, but it wouldn’t be as hard to integrate the idea of exercise/movement in our homeschool environment. Maybe you don’t relish the thought of jogging, but you could add some basic calisthenics – jumping jacks, sit ups, running the stairs or around the house, etc. – to get the blood pumping in your home at regular intervals in the day. I daresay that you will discover improvements in both academics and mood. Try it out!

Kelly