We Know that Exercise Makes You Stronger. Does It Also Make You Smarter?

There is an overwhelming mountain of evidence to support the proposition that exercise is good for you. You can build strength and endurance with strenuous exercise. Depending on what you want the exercise to do for you, one form of exercise may be better than another. For example, if your goal is to have the body of a Greek god or Mr. Universe contest winner, you will probably need to hit the gym for a couple of hours at least three times a week, working with the free weights, bar bells, and Nautilus machines.

If, on the other hand, your goal is to optimize your cardiovascular fitness, you should engage in activities that get you breathing hard. These might include running, swimming, fast break basketball, or cross-country skiing. High cardiovascular fitness will improve your overall health, resistance to disease, and endurance. It will make you physically stronger. Recent research has discovered that it can also make you mentally stronger. It can cause important components of your brain to grow.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO) fifty million people worldwide are affected by dementia. Physical inactivity has been identified as one of seven risk factors for Alzheimer’s disease. Such inactivity leads to low CRF and is also associated with cardiovascular diseases, diabetes mellitus, hypertension, obesity, depression, and cancer mortality.

Wow! What a list of things to be avoided at all costs! There is plenty of reason here to maintain a high level of CRF, even if doing so did not make you smarter. However, the MRI scans that were done in this study showed an unanticipated effect. People with a higher level of CRF showed increases in brain volume in important areas of the brain. Greater gray matter volumes were measured in the hippocampus/parahippocampus, the temporal gyrus, the fusiform gyrus, the cingulate cortex, the orbitofrontal cortex, the cerebellum, the left caudate nucleus, and the left thalamus. These areas have various functions, including memory, stress regulation, decision making, face recognition, as well as emotional and reward-based behaviors.

It appears that cardiorespiratory fitness does more than just enable you to run faster and longer. It also helps your ability to think and may stave off any tendency for you to slip into dementia as you age.

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