If you run before you want to learn something …. it improves the short term memory.
Dr Rhonda Patrick
….. If you are learning something and you run after you learn it …… it’s more a longer-term memory, it improves that.
Every Saturday, I run 5km at maximum effort.
Every Saturday I try to find excuses not to do it because it hurts so much.
As I approach 40 years old, I began to wonder if pushing that hard was good for me?
Then I watched this video, and it justified me pushing hard and made that run a little easier.
DID YOU KNOW?
The brain is at its maximum size at the age of 20.
After that, it starts to atrophy – waste away and decrease in size.
How scarey is that?!
If we live to 100 years old, we may lose up to 20% of our brain mass.
One way to maintain brain mass is by pushing hard during exercise*. Doing this helps build new brains cells, and also maintain current ones. Overall, this can then help with decision making and planning.
*don’t push hard in every exercise session, just every so after. More explained here.
Another way to maintain brain mass is by learning new things.
However, the reason I focus on the exercise part of the video is because it really helps motivate me each Saturday.
As I run at maximum effort, in that really awful zone where everything hurts, I think to myself “I’m keeping my brain healthy and making new brain cells.”
I think it’s important to train in that top zone every so often – I do it once per week.
In this modern world, we have everything we need whenever we want it – food, warm, water and comfort.
Humans were designed to experience stress, but not in the way we know it now – when our laptop breaks, our boss drives us mad, we can’t sleep because the neighbours are throwing a party, that person on social media said this! All these situations are likely to produce the same hormones as being chased by a predator, yet we haven’t got an outlet to use those stress hormones.
When we lived in a simpler world, in the wild, at times we had to push our bodies to get what we needed to stay alive. That sent hormones rushing through our bloodstream, opening up capillaries in the body and brain to keep us sharp.
It’s important to have stresses in life but it’s also important to find an outlet for that stress.
That’s where exercise comes in.
I may not be able to run as fast as I was when I was younger, but I am still pushing hard.
I don’t enjoy being in that zone as much as I used to, but I am pleased I have found a reason to be there.
WATCH THIS to find out more! ⬇️ ⬇️ ⬇️