How to Use Exercise to Improve Your Brains Health, Longevity & Performance

There are good data showing that if people do 6-second sprints, max all-out sprints, on a stationary bicycle, followed by 1-minute rest, and repeat that 6 times, you see significant acute effects on brain performance.

I believe that everybody should include both resistance training... as well as cardiovascular training each week, and that the cardiovascular training should include both high-intensity interval training at least once per week and some so-called long slow distance training, or zone 2 training, each week.

This study has people do six-second all-out effort. You heard that right, six seconds... sprinting on, basically, a stationary bike, then a period of rest of one minute between those six-second all-out efforts, and they see a significant Improvement in cognitive performance.

Most all of the studies—yes, most all of the studies—that have explored the relationship between exercise, brain health, and longevity, and performance find positive effects.

Increases in arousal during or after, in particular after, trying to learn a certain material is going to improve, significantly, the amount of material that one learns, the details of that material, and the persistence of that learning over time.

Osteocalcin is released from the bones during exercise, both in mice and in humans, travels to the brain, so it can cross the blood-brain barrier, and there it can encourage the growth of neurons and their connections within the hippocampus, an area of the brain that's vitally important for the encoding of new memories...

After about 10 days of not doing any training—that is no cardiovascular training, no resistance training—you start to see significant decrements in brain oxygenation levels as well as some other markers that are indicative of brain health...

There are now many, many studies showing that sleep is the thing that mediates many... of the positive effects of exercise on brain performance and long-term brain health.

One question I get a lot is, 'Let's say I don't sleep that well, should I exercise?' Well, the short answer is yes—provided that it was just one night of poor sleep.

Elevations in autonomic arousal after one is exposed to information increases one's memory for that information and one's memory for the details of that information.

High-intensity interval training done before, or believe it or not, even during cognitive flexibility tasks... significantly improves performance on those tasks.

If you are feeling sluggish, you want energy... you need the deployment of norepinephrine in the brain. And by the way, anytime you have a deployment of norepinephrine in the brain, almost always there's a coordinated action of release of dopamine.

We have to ask ourselves, why is it, how is it, that all these different forms of exercise are positively impacting brain performance? ... The answer is arousal.

You can increase levels of autonomic arousal by having people put their arm into ice water for one to three minutes.

The amount and quality of rapid eye movement sleep that you get on the first night after trying to learn something powerfully dictates whether or not you actually learn and remember that thing.