This is Your Brain on Exercise: How Deadlifting Might Spare You From Dementia
When I tell my personal training clients that I have a Bachelor’s degree in Clinical Neuroscience, I usually get some pretty confused looks that lead to the question: “How the heck did you end up working in a gym”?
Which is a fair question.
Although it may not seem like a likely career path at first, by the time you finish reading this I promise it will be clear to you how someone with a passion for promoting overall brain health ended up teaching people how to exercise.
Approximately four years ago I was sitting in a lecture hall at Virginia Tech learning about the evidence for keeping your brain healthy, specifically as it pertains to reducing the risk of neurodegenerative diseases and other consequences of aging.
Neurodegenerative Diseases: the progressive loss of structure or function of different components of nerve cells. Commonly known examples include Alzheimer’s Disease, Parkinson’s Disease and Multiple Sclerosis
What I learned from that lecture that might surprise you (it surprised me) is that the best measures we currently have for reducing neurological changes and diseases as a result of aging are preventative lifestyle habits.
In fact, if I were to sum up the result of what I learned during my four-year Bachelor’s degree in Clinical Neuroscience in one sentence it would be this: Exercise, get good quality sleep, try not to stress too much, be conscientious about what you eat, and regulate your alcohol intake to keep your brain healthy.
Not fancy drugs made in labs or machines that zap your brain, but simple, easy-to-implement healthy habits. In other words, at the current stage of clinical treatment for neurodegenerative diseases and age-related brain deterioration, you’re better off going to the gym and prioritizing your sleep than you are getting the most expensive, cutting-edge clinical treatment to treat or prevent age-related neuronal degeneration.
So to circle back to the original question of how I ended up working in a gym as a personal trainer, it became abundantly clear that if I really wanted to make a difference and be able to help prevent some of the neuronal deterioration and neurodegenerative diseases that I learned about, the very best way for me to do that would be to help people learn to love exercising and get them to do it consistently.
The Brain Benefits of Exercise
You may have already read my previous article on the many benefits of exercise, but that’s just the tip of the cerebral cortex. Given that exercise has such a broad and positive influence on so many health markers, it only makes sense that it would also positively impact your brain. These positive influences become even more pertinent as we consider the consequences of aging on brain health and the potential for exercise to reduce and even prevent some of these consequences.
Exercise Improves Cognition
One of the first things that we need to consider when it comes to the aging brain is the effect on cognition.
Cognition: the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses
In elderly populations we often see varying degrees of cognitive impairment, or in other words, reduced ability to process and acquire information, which can manifest as difficulty making everyday decisions, understanding new concepts, and remembering things. Depending on the degree of cognitive impairment, this can have a pretty significant impact on a person’s ability to function in the day-to-day, and subsequently impact their quality of life.
So what causes these impairments? There are lots of factors that play into how our brain ages, but one of the most well-known factors is neuronal inflammation. Neuronal inflammation is an important concept to understand when it comes to the factors that ultimately lead to and correlate with cognitive impairment seen in elderly populations. As we age, our brain experiences increased levels of inflammation, which is associated with a decrease in anti-inflammatory cytokine levels.
Simply put these anti-inflammatory cytokines are molecules which help control inflammation and regulate our immune system by sending messages to other cells in our body. We know that a decrease in anti-inflammatory cytokine levels is a contributing factor to cognitive impairment in aging populations. Given this information, we can surmise that to reduce cognitive impairment in elderly individuals, we need to increase or promote the effect of anti-inflammatory cytokines which would in turn reduce neuronal inflammation.
What do these anti-inflammatory cytokines have to do with exercise?
As it turns out, exercise might just be a great way to reduce neuronal inflammation. Researchers found that 28 weeks of an elastic-band strength training program increased anti-inflammatory cytokine concentrations in older women with cognitive impairment. What’s more, researchers observed a simultaneous increase in the cognitive profile of participants coinciding with improved anti-inflammatory balance and physical performance, meaning that they were correct in anticipating that increased levels of anti-inflammatory cytokines correlated with improved cognition. These results support the role of strength training as it pertains to potentially improving the cognitive profile in older women with moderate levels of cognitive impairment.
Exercise Improves Memory
Furthermore, there is evidence to support that resistance exercise can have a positive effect on memory, specifically prospective memory. One study sought to examine the effects of resistance exercise on prospective memory.
Prospective memory: remembering to perform a planned action or intention at some point in the future
In this study, participants were told upon beginning the study to remember to ask the research proctor for class credit immediately after finishing the tasks assigned to them in the experiment. The study found that prospective memory was enhanced after a bout of resistance exercise compared to participants who did not participate in any form of exercise. This suggests that acute resistance exercise may be a viable strategy for improving prospective memory.
Exercise Positively Influences Our Ability to Learn
Long-term Potentiation: the neural basis for learning and memory in the brain
To understand how this works, there’s some background we need to cover about the brain: our brain is made up of cells called neurons (billions of them) and these neurons send messages to each other to make other things happen in your body, such as regulating your heart rate, controlling your blood pressure, voluntary movements, etc.
Neurons connected to each other in our brain
Long-term potentiation is facilitated by strengthening the connections between neurons. As we form stronger connections between associated experiences/activities we make more frequent associations between these experiences/activities and this enables the long-term potentiation responsible for learning and memory.
To better understand this, think of neurons as houses in a neighborhood connected to each other by dirt paths. While the contents of each house is important, what is arguably more important is the connectivity of the houses via the dirt paths, as these paths allow the houses to communicate with each other and send each other messages.
The more frequently the houses send each other messages via the dirt paths, the clearer and more defined the dirt paths become, and thus the connection strengthens between these houses.
Take for example learning exercises: you might start off doing a squat. Once you’ve mastered a standard squat you’ll be able to connect that squatting motion to similar variations of the squat, such as a weighted squat, and eventually a unilateral squatting movement such as a split squat or a single leg squat. Your brain will recognize that those squatting motions are similar and make a connection between those movements that allows you to easily learn subsequent similar movements because you recognize that they are similar to movements, and this is the principle of long-term potentiation that is responsible for learning and memory.
Simply put, we learn new things by associating them with things we already know, and the underlying molecular process responsible for this is the strengthening of connections between neurons in our brain, also known as long-term potentiation.
Interestingly enough, researchers have found that exercise may facilitate long-term potentiation following brain injury. In one study, researchers used a rodent model to examine the effect of exercise following a stroke, in which they put the rodents through an exercise training program five days after the stroke occurred. They found that exercise training facilitated the formation of learning-dependent long-term potentiation specifically in part of the hippocampus, which is an area of the brain notoriously known to be responsible for memory. They noted that “exercise training improved the opening conductance level, time and probability of NMDA receptor channels and accelerated the formation of learning-dependent LTP in the contralateral hippocampal CA3 area”.
In layman’s terms: exercise training increased the probability that connected neurons would receive messages from each other, thereby strengthening the connection between these neurons and facilitating learning and memory via long-term potentiation.
Exercise May Reduce The Risk of Alzheimer’s Disease
Exercise has also been shown to correlate with a reduced risk of some neurodegenerative diseases. Higher levels of exercise and non-exercise physical activities have been associated with a reduced risk of Alzheimer’s disease according to a study that examined the relationship between total daily exercise and non-exercise physical activity in older individuals without dementia. The results determined that a person with low total daily physical activity in the tenth percentile (scoring higher than only 10% of the norm group or below the average) would be at more than 2-fold higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s Disease compared to a participant with high total daily physical activity in the 90th percentile (scoring higher than 90% of the norm group or above average).
One rationale behind this is that resistance training can significantly reduce serum levels of homocysteine in the elderly. It isn’t important here to understand what homocysteine is or does, just know that it is naturally found in our bodies and is healthy at a certain level, but that at higher than normal levels is indicative of various health consequences. This finding is important in the context of the brain because we know that increased levels of homocysteine are known to be a strong, independent risk factor for the development of dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease.
Take Actions Today That Your Future Self Will Thank You For
With all that being said, I want you to take a moment and ask yourself: What you wouldn’t do to almost guarantee a reduced likelihood of the cognitive decline and neurodegenerative diseases as you age?
“To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable’ (Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891).”
As of right now, there’s no magic drug that will stave off Alzheimer’s Disease, or boost your memory, however, we do know that incorporating exercise into your daily routine plays a significant role in keeping the brain healthy as we age. To summarize what we’ve already discussed, research has supported the important role of exercise in:
increasing anti-inflammatory cytokine levels in the brain thereby reducing neuronal inflammation associated with cognitive impairment as we age
improving prospective memory, or our ability to remember to perform a planned action or intention at some point in the future
facilitating long-term potentiation (the basis for learning and memory) following a stroke
reducing the risk of Alzheimer’s Disease
Even before reading this, you could probably think of some real-life examples of older individuals who exemplify the cognitive benefits associated with exercising regularly. As a personal trainer, I get to see living proof of these benefits every day just by chatting with some of our quick-witted and mentally sharp older clients who made their health a priority.
If you’re like me, you’d like to keep your wits about you for as long as possible and one of the best ways to do that is to exercise as regularly as you can. There’s no better time to start facilitating the long-term health of your brain than today, so perhaps today is the day to do something for your future self. If you need help getting going, we’re here and are happy to get you started with a free exploratory call by clicking below.
