When you exercise, you also help your mind stay powerful, image: Unsplash
Neuroscience has discovered which exercise makes you smarter, which helps you stay smart over the years and which helps you achieve functional aging.
Exercising is not only good for your body and muscles, or for maintaining a healthy weight, but it is also very good for your mental health, your brain and longevity, so it should always be a priority. When you exercise, you also help your mind stay powerful.
It's true that the brain can experience some degree of deterioration as we grow older. Science says that it begins to shrink after age 30 and that we will all experience some cognitive decline, but it has also been discovered that, through good habits, such as diet and exercise, we can help protect the brain and help it become smarter.
When you think about longevity, you don't just have to think about living longer; you have to think about what you can do to stay healthy, strong, active and smart as you get older. To achieve this, there is one type of exercise that makes a big difference.
We don't need to resort to extreme treatments or make radical changes to increase our life expectancy, maintain good health, and keep our minds sharp as we age. What we do need to do is add good habits and exercise (among other things).
According to Health.com, experts say exercise and physical activity are the most important habits for longevity, while the WHO says you should do a minimum of 150 minutes a week.
But what kind of exercise makes and keeps you smart, while also promoting longevity?
According to INC.com , a study recently published in NeuroImage: Clinical, resistance training , performed regularly, is the most likely to help delay or reduce cognitive decline as we age. These exercises involve bodyweight exercises and weights.
And this is not the first study to praise the benefits of weight training, as several experts have spoken about the importance of this exercise to live longer and better. Weight training also helps prevent Sarcopenia , which is the loss of muscle mass that we experience with aging, and which affects mobility, independence and increases the risk of falls and accidents.
INC mentions that the study says: “For the first time we demonstrate that six months of high-intensity resistance exercise is able to not only promote better cognition in those with [mild cognitive impairment], but also to protect the hippocampal subfields vulnerable to Alzheimer's disease from degeneration for at least 12 months after the intervention.”
In other words, this type of exercise helps protect the areas of the brain that are responsible for things like memory and learning, in addition to helping your brain adapt to changes and maintain its plasticity, and promoting neuronal growth.
Cardiovascular exercise is also good for your health, but resistance training has been shown to be the best, both for longevity and for maintaining a smart, healthy and strong brain.
This is one more way of confirming that we don't stop moving because we get older, but rather we get older because we stop moving.
[via GQ Mexico]
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