Editors Note: Ask your healthcare provider for advice before starting an exercise program.
CNN
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What if you could look at all the things you do each day—walking from room to room, setting up a presentation at your desk, running up and down the stairs to deliver folded laundry or running around the block—and see which helps you more or hurts your brain?
A new study attempts to answer that question by attaching activity monitors to the thighs of nearly 4,500 people in the UK and tracking their movements 24/7 for seven days. The researchers then examined how the participants’ behavior affected their short-term memory, problem solving, and processing skills.
Here’s the good news: People who spent “a small amount of time in more vigorous activity — less than 6 to 9 minutes — compared to sitting, sleeping, or light activity had higher cognition scores,” said study author John Mitchell, a medical researcher. PhD student on the Training Board of the Institute of Sport, Exercise and Health at University College London, in an email.
Moderate physical activity is usually defined as brisk walking, cycling, or jogging up and down stairs. Vigorous movements, such as aerobic dancing, jogging, running, swimming, and uphill cycling, will increase your heart rate and breathing.
learn, They are published Monday in the Journal of Epidemiology and Public Healthit was found that doing less than 10 minutes of moderate to vigorous activity each day improved study participants’ working memory but had the greatest impact on executive processes such as planning and organizing.
Mitchell says the cognitive boost is modest, but with the extra time spent engaging in more vigorous exercise, the benefits increase.
“Because we did not monitor participants’ cognition over many years, this may be because individuals who are more mobile tend to have higher average cognition,” he said. “But, yes, it can also mean that subtle changes in our daily lives can have negative consequences for our cognition.”
Stephen Malin, a professor in the Department of Kinesiology and Health at Rutgers University in New Jersey, told CNN the research provides new insights into how activity interacts with sedentary behavior and sleep.
“The understanding of the interaction between sleep and various physical activities is often understudied,” said Mallen, who was not involved in the new study.
Although the study had some limitations, including a lack of knowledge about the health of the participants, the results demonstrated how “gathering movement patterns from day to week to month is just as important, if not more important, than just going out for one exercise session.” practice.” “.
There’s bad news, too: Spending more time sleeping, sitting, or doing only light movement is associated with negative effects on the brain. The study found that cognition decreased by 1% to 2% after replacing a portion of moderate to vigorous physical activity equivalent to eight minutes of sedentary behavior, six minutes of light intensity, or seven minutes of sleep.
“In most cases, we show that less than 7 to 10 minutes of MVPA (moderate to vigorous physical activity) is harmful,” Mitchell said.
Mitchell stressed that this change was simply an association, not cause and effect, due to the study’s observational method.
In addition, the results of research on sleep cannot be underestimated, he said. Good sleep is essential for the brain to function at peak performance.
“The evidence for the importance of sleep for cognitive performance is very strong,” says Mitchell, “but there are two main caveats. First, oversleeping may be associated with poorer cognitive performance.
Second, the quality of sleep may be more important than its duration. Our accelerometers can estimate how long people slept, but they can’t tell us how well they slept.”
Additional studies need to be conducted to verify these findings and to understand the role of each type of activity. Even so, says Mitchell, the study “highlights how very modest differences in people’s everyday movements — less than 10 minutes — are associated with very real changes in our cognitive health.”
