Mind-Blowing Benefits of Exercise
Discover some of the most incredible benefits about exercising and how it impacts your overall health.
Exercise enhances your body, mind and mood.
Maybe you exercise to tone your thighs, build your biceps or flatten your belly. Or maybe you work out to ward off the health conditions, like heart disease, diabetes and cancer.
There are many benefits to exercise, but how about sweating to improve your mind?
"Exercise is the single best thing you can do for your brain in terms of mood, memory and learning," says Dr. John Ratey, author of the book, "Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain," and an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. "Even 10 minutes of activity changes your brain."
If you need a little extra incentive to lace up those sneakers and get moving, here are a few mind-blowing benefits and ways exercise can boost your brainpower and overall health:
Staves off the aging process
Want to look younger for longer? Exercise makes this dream a reality, as it may actually work to reverse the toll stress has on the aging process.
Being highly active may reduce aging at the cellular level by up to nine years, according to a study published in the July 2017 issue of Preventive Medicine. Among nearly 6,000 U.S. adults, participants with the least signs of chromosomal aging were those who exercised the most. In the study from Brigham Young University, women who jogged at least 30 minutes daily and men who jogged 40 minutes daily, five days a week, were considered highly active. In comparison, both moderately active participants and those with sedentary lifestyles had significantly shorter telomeres, which are the DNA bookends on each chromosome associated with cellular aging.
Federal guidelines recommend 150 to 300 minutes of moderate, heart-pumping activity a week for maximum health benefits.
Helps lift depression and anxiety
Some clients who work with Meghan Kennihan, a certified personal trainer and running coach based in LaGrange, Illinois, reported feeling depressed or anxious. Workouts combat these feelings by boosting their endorphins, or feel-good chemicals in the brain. The end result? Workouts help them feel better, she says.
A 2021 randomized trial in the Annals of Family Medicine that compared physical activity with antidepressant drugs in those ages 65 and older found that improvement in depression was similar in both the exercise group and the medication group after one month. The results favored antidepressant meds over the long term, but study participants still found exercise to be helpful for them.
Research suggests that burning 350 calories three times a week through sustained, sweat-inducing activity can reduce symptoms of depression about as effectively as antidepressants. That may be because exercise appears to stimulate the growth of neurons in certain brain regions affected by depression.
Intense exercise improved mental fitness in an imaging study that looked at chemical messengers in the brain. When participants exercised on stationary bikes to reach near-peak heart rates, their levels of the neurotransmitters glutamate and GABA increased as measured by advanced MRI imaging, in the study published in February 2016 in the Journal of Neuroscience. Glutamate and GABA deficiencies have been found in people with depression. Read More…
