The beneficial effects of exercise on the brain

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good morning
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hi everyone sorry for the late start uh we've had some technical difficulties getting the zoom meeting going uh but we should be good to go now
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cool awesome right um what about the delay you know technology is a wonderful but it works
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when it doesn't splits but we're all ready to go now um so I'm here today to give a little
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bit of a talk on exercise and the Brain we know a lot about exercise in the body
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I mean that that's been done over and over and over again you know
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the body then exercise all the benefits that exercise has on our bodies but not
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much is really known about how exercise affects the brain and it's sort of a new
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area of research and science that's developing rather fast
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um and what exercise does to the brain is quite amazing and if you exercise
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program you're participating a bit of exercise you'll get really really good benefits from the exercise so I'm going
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to talk to you a little bit about what you can do and how to supports your brain first of all I want you to think of a
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couple of places in the world and think that you can get a link between them so the one is
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ikara in Greece another is Okinawa in Japan and we've got Sardinia in Italy
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a in Costa Rica what do you think
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is the commonality between those places
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yes that's a longevity so residents of those towns live the
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longest and a lot of scientists have gone along and done a lot of research around why is this the case and they
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found that physical activity is a way of life in these Villages or towns
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so a lot of them went in hello okay in physical activity is a way of life how
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does this impact on health and well-being and they've found that in these Villages uh dementia and
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cognitive decline are the lowest approximately 75 percent less
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in the western world okay so this is the the kinds of
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researchers that we've done around us and there was a connection they've made is that physical activity
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and it's mainly aerobic in the state but there's a lot of work going around uh uh
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with strength training in the brain so they found that Earth activity and it's this stage we're looking a lot around
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the aerobic activity that has really really good
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benefits for the brain so
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let's begin
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what did I say about technology
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so exercise we now know has profound impact on the
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brain and this leads to numerous cognitive and mental health benefits and
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what I'm going to do now I'm just going to go over some of these very briefly
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with you so you just get an idea of what happens to this cognitive function and how the exercise depicts the brain
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so if we have a look um when we exercise
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this promotes better blood circulation and increases blood flow and and spot
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that's a rich oxygenated blood that gets increased to the brain and this then
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provides the brain with a lot of necessary nutrients of oxygen and this then helps improve brain function I mean
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if you've got a lot of more nutrients a lot of oxygen going it's kind of like a no-brainer the brains kind of function better
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then exercise has shown to improve production and release of various
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neurotransmitters in the brain this includes endorphins um dopamine serotonin and nor
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epinephrine and a lot of these are sort of also known as happy hormones they make us feel good and these chemicals
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they play a really crucial role in regulating our mood reducing stress and
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enhancing those feelings of well-being yeah we also know that exercise now
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stimulates the production of new neurons in the hippocampus now we all know what
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to hear hippocampuses the hippocampuses and the area that is
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um responsible for memory thought processing that sort of thing and when
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we get deep generation on the hippocampus that's really start getting um memory loss Alzheimer's disease
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dementia but we know exercise plays a big role in preventing this
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so this process is known as neurogenesis and it is sort of contribute uh improved
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cognitive function and reducing those neurodegenerative diseases I can
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understand the same dimension um we also know that exercise and
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particularly regular physical activity has been linked to improvements in cognitive abilities such as attention
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memory and problem solving skills and exercise also supports the growth of new
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connections between brain cells stripping those neural networks and
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facilitating efficient communication within the brain so those new
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connections are starting paper but the brain is actually functioning much better and of course the good old one
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anxiety and stress now we know that exercise has a stress relieving effect
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on the brain by reducing those stress hormones like cortisol and promotes the
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release of endorphins and they are natural food boosters
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so engaging in physical activity we can alleviate anxiety and depression and
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enhance overall psychological well-being
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improve sleep it's a regular exercise will help
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regulate patterns of quality of sleep and of course will improve your sleep
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and it can then also promote more or restorative sleep and
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when you have got good restorative sleep we're also going to improve brain function
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and then as I said before also protection against neurodegenerative diseases
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um so that reduces that risk of these neurodegeneral conditions such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease
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and exercise may also help by protecting the brain and it reduces inflammation
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okay and it promotes growth of new neurons and enhances overall brain
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health so that's a in a little bit of a nutshell that is basically what regular
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exercise can do to your brain but I want to stop now and I want to
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focus on what's known as brain derived neurotropic Factor
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because brain derived neurotropic factor that is an important protein and this
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plays a role in urogenesis or the growth of new brain cells
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and it's often known as the brain fertilizer right so you want to know what okay
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you've got this stranger right here in public it's brain fertilizer but what
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does it do okay it Spoons the creation of neurons in the hippocampus we spoke
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about campus and also now exercise boosts the number of mitochondria now if you don't
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know what mitochondria are they are little energy factories inside
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cells and those cells are found in the brain so we get mitochondria inside ourselves and they are energy factories
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they produce energy so when we exercise we actually improve the number of mitochondria so if you've got
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um more of this sort of mitochondria floating around you're going to get more energy and if it's more
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so in the brain the end the brain is going to have more energy so that's just going to boost brain function right
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so we have these so you've got um the exercise and the increase in
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mitochondria and this seems to bolster against dementia and Alzheimer's disease
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so it's really the exercise the mitochondria the brain the blood flow
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through the brain that's giving the brain a really good boost it's getting all these nutrients it's
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also getting rid of um waste products that it doesn't want and it's getting all these little
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connections happening again and it's making us
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more cognitive you know where and healthy want to put it that way
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so just a little uh diagram here of the brain for those of you who are not aware of brain so you
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can see we've got this above campus the egg mcdela hypothalamus Thalamus and the basal ganglion so the hippocampus is
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what we've been speaking about that's that little area um just next to the green board
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so that hippocampus is really important for memory navigation thought processes
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word processing and we often find people who have dementia and Alzheimer's
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disease that little area of the hippocampus is often
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um smaller it has atrophic in other words it's shrunk
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right so the hippocampus is really a little important part of the brain that we need
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you know to stay cognitive a way or cognitively healthy
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don't you always think that one cool so if you're looking at this
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bdnf or brain derived neurotropics Factor so the thing is we want to
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increase the speed dnf so we can get a bit of a boost to the
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brain one bit of this all this hormone it's almost like giving the brain a bit of a steroid injections when you call it
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that okay but not really so if you want to increase your brain
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the right neurotropic Factor the way to do this is to exercise and exercise at least 30 minutes and it
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has to be daily exercise so the type of exercise that I recommend here is brisk
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walking or cycling now you want to look at the experiment but how about if I tell you you can get
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more bdnf if you wanted to it probably will go here I'm up for that so how do
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we do this we need to increase the intensity of the exercise so a little bit more vigorous
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exercise example is your identity intermittent training is really good and
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a lot of research around brain and brain health and mental health is telling us that exercise is really good but we have
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to increase the tempo of the exercise a little bit more to get better effects
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for the brain so here we can see if you want a better increase in the ingredient in it a
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little bit more I think the team post that vigorous exercise is really really good for us now you don't have to go and
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do 20 000 Sprints that sort of stuff just at the tempo a little bit more like
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when you're exercising you've got your moderate exercise and you've got your sort of
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vigorous exercise so I would say just in between those it's a moderate and vigorous
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moderately they do assignment so get the heart rate going right so between about
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60 to 70 of your maximum heart rate would give a good boosting and if you can go higher
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awesome the trouble now is
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if we don't continue with the exercise if you stop exercising and you go back
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to living on the couch right those benefits that you've built
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up can what can all be wiped out by being sedentary again they even say that
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if you exercise 30 minutes daily and you go back and you sit all day some of those
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benefits can be lost right so if you're exercising and what
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do we do a lot when we're at work we sit behind our computer screens you know all day we don't get up and do
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some stuff so what they're also telling us is when are you doing some exercise you want to increase the brain function and get the
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brain really working it's done sit all day every hour it should get up and just
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walk a little bit and then come sit down again because you might be doing a 30-minute exercise session let's say early in the
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morning you go to work and you're sitting all day some of those benefits are going to be wiped out because of
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that Century behaviors all get so used to you know you work all day
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finish work jump in the car go home collapse on the couch go to sleep wake up the next morning try and do a bit of
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exercise and it just becomes repetitive over and over and then we wonder why we're so kind and we can't think
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properly all right so let's have a look now at the best
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type of exercise I reckon for a lot of people is walking and running it's the easiest type of exercise we can all walk
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we can all run it just need a pair of good shoes and you could go for a walk
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and now the reason why we're eating walking and running is one of the best type of exercise
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because when we run and walk at an easy pace and allows the mind to wander so if
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you're walking in a comfortable Pace you join in the comfortable you start thinking you know you start clearing the
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mind I know if I go for a nice long walk um a bit of a job you start thinking and
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you say oh you know you start thinking but clearly at times some ideas come to mind oh what
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about this what about that that's that's really good because when we walk and Jog
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at easy pace and the mind starts to wander this temporary temporarily
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reduces activity in the prefrontal regions of the brain
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okay and the prefrontal re reaches the brain they are more responsible for
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rational straight line thinking and if we reduce these activities that allows
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for broader more creative thinking so some companies in the states or some
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companies have done a lot of work around you know exercise in the brain they'll normally go for a 15-minute walk before
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they had a meeting to clear the head and to start thinking more creatively
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and the the really good thing about this is when you go for a walk and you know you
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start thinking more creatively these are things last for us the 15 minutes after
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you've finished that activity so you know if you've got a big meeting
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coming up for example uh go for a walk make sure you get back 15 minutes before
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so you're not or sweaty you know then going to the meeting and you'll still have those good effects of the
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exercise so a better research has also been done around uh exercise and a group of
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um students for taking so they took 20 students and they looked at some of the
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students that a 20-minute walk and some of the students just
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set quietly before taking a test and they found after treatment of the Walk
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they look at the brain and brain bunch of brain activity so that after putting my students and a lot of running
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activity going on so the brains were really alive and ready to go what is those we will set quietly explain it was
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decreased it's a really interesting with that one um the other thing about walking is when we
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walk every time your foot hits the ground it increases blood flow back to
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the brain by 13 percent right that's really really
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phenomenal now some research has gone and have a look at walking in the brain and have helped
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us uh how far you have to walk so they're ripping ahead 20 for 10 to 20
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minutes but also they look and if you take 20 steps per minute
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and your heart rate is about 120 bits per minute that is what they call a
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sweet spot that just gives a rush of blood flow to the brain so if you've got a heart rate
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monitor and you post yourself and you make 120 steps per minute and you've got your heart rate going at 120 beats per
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minute you know you're in that sweet spot probably going to take a bit of doing to get that going but research reckons
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That's The Sweet Spot to get that brain flow really going and get it going pretty well
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um so the other thing that I mentioned is strength training
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now strength planning is is um one of those activities that a lot of us
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tend not to do as we age um but strength training is really
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really important not just for the brain but for the body in general because we know as we age we all lose muscle mass
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it's called sarcopena it's natural it happens to all of us so you've got to maintain muscle mass
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you know to maintain functionality as we get older but researchers also now
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telling us that strength training plays a really important role in brain health
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and brain function in 2019 there was a study that looked at
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strength and how people have declined in strengths so
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in 2009 they found that this was a 30 percent
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decline in muscle endurance when they compared a group of people so they
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tested in 2014 and they did exactly the same case in
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1998 and between that period there was a 30 decline in strict endurance but the
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trouble is we are getting weaker and weaker and weaker because we're becoming more and more Centric the problem is
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younger people are becoming less and less and less stronger over that becoming more weaker
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so there is a problem here now you want to know well okay so what what is this going to do with the brain so when they
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have a look at people who have got more strength and are more stronger they found stronger people actually do have
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more gray matter okay so the brains
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are a bit bigger if you want if you want to put it that way and now there's another thing here
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osteocalcin Osteo calcium is a hormone that's
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released from the bones when we move against gravity in any form of
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weight-bearing exercise now the interesting thing about osteocalcin Studies have now linked it
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to size and connectivity of the hippocampus there's the girl hippocampus again
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Okay so strength training hippocampus there's a link there
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and they also now have found that
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our body within your body there's an unconscious sense of the health and state of our muscles and bones
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so this is they call it the musculoskeletal division so your body senses
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the condition of your muscles your tendons and your ligaments so what's
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happening with bones now the problem here is if we're losing a lot of strings
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these messages that are consistently being sent around the body
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uh our strength our agility and our movement apparatus so if these messages
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are going around and are telling us well hang on this is not looking too good this is
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going to have effect on your sense of well-being and feeds into the implicit sense of what we
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can handle okay so the body knows well I can handle this I can't handle that there's an
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underlying sense in our bodies and the problem here is we
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see decreasing levels of strength in modern society
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and this might play a part of an increasing levels of anxiety and depression that we are seeing a lot of
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now a good example of strength and brain and anxiety and depression
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strength training and physical strength is often seen uh it's
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not often seen as linked to self-esteem so you a lot of people are physically
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strong and healthy seem to be you know they've got a lot of self-esteem they feel good they feel
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healthy they feel empowered now a really good example here is um two or three years ago we did a study
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in Linton where we looked at our females and strength training because a lot of
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our females were um having trouble with the land combat fitness test particularly the upper body
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components the strength components because we all know the differences between males and females is upper body
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stream so we did a strength training program put our females uh
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on the the study and it was an intervention 20 it was 12 weeks
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currently remember but after the exercise with the strength training program they had no problems in passing
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the land combat fitness test their regular Fitness label case they smoked
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them they actually came to us and said we smoke these and the the best thing about that when we spoke
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to these females post the exercise poster training a lot of them said to us I've never felt so empowered
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in all my life after I've done this training program and I kid you not some of these
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um ladies were lifting weights that I can barely get off the ground and the look The problem is with a lot
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of females and strength training a lot of females think that if I do strength training I'm going to get big muscles
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that's not the case that big muscles has got a lot to do with hormones testosterone estrogen so
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ladies you won't keep with muscles if you do a lot of strength between there's a neurological effect
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right so strength training is pretty important and it's really important to
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get that sense of well-being to be strong and healthy and it does have a really good positive effect on the brain
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I know a lot of people who do a lot of strength training after strength training you feel really good about yourself because you've accomplished
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something now the thing is we're strength training you don't have to go to the gym and push
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heavy whites there's a lot of other stuff we can do you know you can't do resistor training
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you can do weights there's nothing wrong with doing weights weights are really good for us
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body weight exercises just use your own body weight set up squish UPS all that kind of stuff and rubber bands rubber
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bands is another great way to do exercise there's various ways of increasing your strength and exercise
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and you really have those good benefits so if we have a look at
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but it's like here exercise their Mental Health exercise really does have good positive
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effects on mental health so you can see there you know those happy chemicals that I spoke about earlier it really
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does get those going self-confidence especially those who increase their strength levels strength training uh
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Outdoors if you go for your walk you know you get a nice boost of vitamin D which is really
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important across as well that cognitive decline within their anxiety
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it's a good way to relieve the anxiety and we do know now that we are seeing a
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lot of anxiety and depression in our organization because of the high workloads of that number of people that
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are leaving and interestingly again we looked at an over 40s program we ran in
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Linton um it was just after the first covert we all came out
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of lockdown we did a program we did some measures on anxiety and depression at
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the start of the program we had very high levels of anxiety and and much of
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bad on the depression scale but they were quite up there um good at exercise intervention for
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people particularly in that age group of over 40 post exercise those levels
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dropped significantly just after doing some good exercise and
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targeting at that level a lot of us don't go to exercise or don't go to the
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gym because it's too many young people I know a lot of people who are older
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should say a little bit more senior you know one exercise programs that are more tailored for them so for us
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um and that's good at the moment but just remember you know when you exercise don't forget your strength training
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don't forget Joy Rogan as that all are really important for us um brain power memory relaxation really
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good for relaxation the thing is with exercise and
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relaxation you can do different type of exercises to help you relax yoga is a really good one dancing
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dancing is really really good for the brain because when you dance you've got to think you know there's the
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choreography you've got to think of the steps you're taking so you've got to think while you're exercising another
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good um way to exercise and get the brain going is often you'll go to the gym and
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on the treadmill they'll have card games solitaires one that I've seen so while you're doing your walk on the treadle
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play some Solitaire that gets the brain going while you're doing exercise
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what um that just helps us be more productive and also I've said before it also
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reduces stress so there are many many benefits of doing some exercise
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all right to help the brain not just the body healthy mind healthy body we all
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know that but it's good to know that you know exercise does really help
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our brains and the more we exercise the better it is for us
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and then there's the whole thing you know get into a habit if so should become a habit but that's a whole
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different talk yeah it's an exercise are there
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any questions uh for anyone listening at home feel free to check in your questions on the
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chat now we can uh ask them in person here
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do you think it's better to exercise in the morning when you get up to start your day and get everything Reef up or
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later um you know early evening or is that going to rub your brain have too much to
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sleep no no no that's a really good that's a really good question and that question comes up quite regularly
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um particularly when it comes to cognitive function the brain and exercise um
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a couple of years ago in the U.S they did a big study on exercise and physical
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conditioning or physical education and they went into the schools and they got a lot of the kids to do PE
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before they started school and they took the subjects they look at with science
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and maths um they put them straight after the PE classes and the PE classes were
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developed so each child had to reach a certain heart rate they weren't given their own heart rate monitors and it was
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about it was getting them up to that little sort of the biggest level of exercise so it was self-led and a lot of
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the children brought into the exercise program and they found that after the
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the training when they went into their maths and their science the grades
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skyrocketed so that early morning exercise going to the exercise before you've got to go and
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do some you know thinking or subjects where you've got to think a lot really did improve so it depends what you're
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doing I mean you can exercise in the morning you can exercise it doesn't really matter but if you want to get that real push of
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Brian and get that cognitive function going they're reckon exercise in the morning sets you up for the day
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because it gets that blood flow going to the brain and gets the all those little connections going
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um and it makes you think clearer clearer yeah so yeah so in the morning
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I would reckon if you've got you know sitting himself for the day a good morning session would be really good
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um lunch time if you've got meetings coming up in the afternoon go for a nice walk perhaps and then
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and get back to the office but they do reckon a lot of exercise around exercise in the brain it doesn't
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cognitive function does talk about that morning exercise yeah
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but then there was a good program I think it was last night about sleep and exercise do
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we need more sleep or do we need to exercise more we need both because sleep as we're getting tomorrow
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is really really important for us as well and that's also important for the brain
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so you need good quality sleep but you also need good exercise so don't
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compromise your sleep you know just because you really have to wake up at four o'clock in the morning exercise
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session do your exercise later on in the day now as long as you're doing some form of
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exercise we've just got a question in the chat from the people at home from Richard and
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they say how does VO2 max fit into your brain health well VO2 max obviously
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virtual Max is your maximum oxygen advocate so the more oxygen your body
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can utilize and use the better it is going to be for your brain so if we increase VO2 max we're going to
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increase oxygen uptake and of course you know the body and the Brain the circulatory system work together so you
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will then increase the oxygen uptake to the brain as well so that blood flow
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will go more so we'll be more oxygen going to the brain and more nutrients as well that would definitely
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help with brain function and common to function yeah because it's not just a lung thing it's
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a frying thing as well yeah I've also got another question that asks uh when is the latest time you should be
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exercising before going to sleep so especially if you have a higher heart rate that's a good one so if you
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um and we've talked about this a lot more in tomorrow's talk about sleep so they really can you should not exercise
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on your last exercise should be an hour before you go to bed
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but ideally three hours before you go to sleep because when we exercise the core temperature increases and then that can
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stop you from getting to sleep but you don't want to go to bed when the body is too hot
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right so you want to get experience when you've cooled down a little bit and you've relaxed a lot more so exercise
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before sleep is really good but try and limit that to about three hours before there's a lot of research in that area
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as well saying that exercise before sleep is actually okay but it depends on the type of exercise if you're doing
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meditation yoga that sort of exercise or activity that might help better but if
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you're going to do sort of vigorous exercise where you're going to run you know and get the heart rate up to about 70 80 percent of Max now let's just keep
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you awake for a lot longer
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together questions unspoken
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and so the questions so far online if anyone else has any more listening at home Chuck them through now
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foreign
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there will be a recording of This seminar there will be released so you can come back and watch it again if
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there's anything you missed if there's anything you want to re-go over cool thanks for coming in I'll be finishing
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up now okay