Exercise & Fitness Archive

Exercise helps keep the brain healthy by improving memory and problem solving, and may even reduce the risk of dementia. Dr. Alvaro Pascual-Leone advocates regular exercise as a treatment for all people and explains more about the benefits for the brain.

You’ve probably heard that if you want to lose weight, it’s as simple as “eat less, exercise more.” A recent study suggests that a lot of exercise doesn’t always translate into a lot of extra calories burned. But even if you never lose a single pound with exercise, it has so many other benefits for your body and mind that it’s always worth it to be active. Give it a try today!

People new to yoga will eventually learn the sun salutation, a so-called "yoga flow." You can modify the sun salutation and still learn all the basic moves by using a chair and a floor mat. Learn more at Introduction to Yoga from Harvard Health Publishing.

 Image: Thinkstock

Q. I heard regular aerobic exercise is better for the brain than strength exercises (resistance training). Is that true?

A. The study you probably heard about involved rats, not humans. The rats were made to engage each day in sustained aerobic exercise, high-intensity interval training, or resistance training, or they were allowed to just be sedentary. At the end of the study, the researchers examined the rats' brains. The rats doing regular aerobic exercise had more brain cells than the sedentary rats. However, the rats made to perform high-intensity interval training or the ones doing resistance training did not have more brain cells than the sedentary rats.

Image: Yuri Arcurs/Thinkstock

News Briefs

Here's something to jolt you off the couch and get you exercising: a study published Feb. 10, 2016, in Neurology links poor fitness levels in middle age to brain shrinkage 20 years later. Researchers, including some from Harvard Medical School, looked at the cardiovascular fitness of about 1,100 people, average age of 40, who were free of dementia and heart disease. The participants had taken treadmill tests to determine their cardiovascular fitness levels based on how much oxygen their bodies used during exercise. About 20 years later, participants took another treadmill test and underwent neuropsychological testing and MRI brain scans. The scans showed that people who were unfit in middle age had smaller brains in older age, compared with people who were fit in middle age. This doesn't prove that inactivity in midlife causes brain shrinkage. But previous studies have shown that regular, moderate-intensity exercise may be associated with slower brain aging.

A recent study that tracked healthy volunteers’ exercise and drinking habits found that they tended to drink more on days when they exercised more. But this study might have had drastically different results if conducted with different groups. For example, what results might we see if the volunteers were sedentary people looking to exercise more — or people with unhealthy drinking patterns who were working to cut back?