Tag: mental

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Cardio exercise gets more blood to the aging brain

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My new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Also check out my new book, THE EXPLORER'S GENE: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, published in March 2025.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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We’ve been told repeatedly in recent years that exercise is good for the aging brain. An interesting new study, due to appear in next week’s issue of the American Journal of Neuroradiology, offers a clear picture (literally) of why that is. Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill took brain images (magnetic resonance angiographs, to be precise) of two groups of seniors — one group consistently exercised at least three hours a week, the other reported less than 90 minutes of any type of physical activity weekly:

Aerobically active subjects exhibited more small-diameter [blood] vessels with less tortuosity, or twisting, than the less active group, exhibiting a vessel pattern similar to younger adults…

The brain’s blood vessels naturally narrow and become more tortuous with advancing age, but the study showed the cerebrovascular patterns of active patients appeared “younger” than those of relatively inactive subjects.

It’s a pretty small study (14 subjects), and it’s always worth asking whether there are other underlying factors that could explain both the higher activity levels AND the better blood vessels in one group. Still, the link between aerobic exercise and nice big blood vessels seems pretty logical. Next step: take some sedentary seniors, get them to start exercising, and see if the blood vessels in their brains get bigger.

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Does aerobic exercise make you instantly smarter?

THANK YOU FOR VISITING SWEATSCIENCE.COM!

My new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Also check out my new book, THE EXPLORER'S GENE: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, published in March 2025.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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It’s old news that exercise is good for the brain. Dan Peterson of 80percentmental does a nice job of summing up some of the benefits here: increasing blood flow to the brain, making new brain cells, managing glucose. We usually think of that in terms of long-term benefits — stay active to avoid losing your marbles.

That’s why a forthcoming study (now available online) in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise caught my attention. Continue reading “Does aerobic exercise make you instantly smarter?”

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Mental fatigue and physical performance

THANK YOU FOR VISITING SWEATSCIENCE.COM!

My new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Also check out my new book, THE EXPLORER'S GENE: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, published in March 2025.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

***

There’s an interesting study in this month’s Journal of Applied Physiology about the link between mental fatigue and physical endurance. In a nutshell: “When participants performed a mentally fatiguing task prior to a difficult exercise test, they reached exhaustion more quickly than when they did the same exercise when mentally rested.”

This is a topic I’ve thought a lot about, in part because my occupation is so physically undemanding. I typically spend the day sitting in front of my computer, chatting on the phone, and reading. But if I try to do a hard running workout at the end of a day where I’ve been filing a story on deadline, I STINK! My performance really suffers compared to days when I’ve just been reading or researching. But I don’t get a lot of sympathy from my training partners when I say, “I’m exhausted, I was really typing hard today.”

I had thought it might have something to do with stress hormones, but the researchers (from Bangor University in Wales) suggest another mechanism. Apparently, concentrating hard requires the anterior cingulate cortex region of the brain. Studies have found that rats with a lesion in that area are unable to work as hard for a reward as normal rats — so it may be that our ability to accurately gauge physical effort is put out of whack by too much hard thinking.

This is also another clue that our physical performance limits are almost always mental rather than physical. What we perceive as our bodies reaching their outer limits may, in many cases, just be case of frazzled nerve endings in the anterior cingulate cortex…