Build Up Your “Mental Muscle” with Exercise
This week my exercise time seemed to require greater effort than usual. My heavy schedule had me feeling fatigued before my weight lifting, walking, and Pilates sessions even began. But I remained determined. Why? Because I knew that not only would my body benefit from this “sacrifice of praise”, I was strengthening my brain in the process.
Sound too good to be true? Here’s the fact: contrary to what you may have heard or read, you were not born with a finite number of brain cells. The truth is that our brains were created with the capacity to churn out new brain cells when old ones die—which, by the way, starts to occur at a steady rate after the age of thirty. So while brain cell loss is a natural part of aging, brain cell replenishment can still be had.
While it is fairly well known that using your brain and feeding it the right stuff—specifically “heart-healthy foods”—will help keep your mental muscle in good working order, I have recently discovered a fascinating (and powerful) way to grow new brain cells and protect the connections between existing ones with something I do already—physical exercise!
When you and I stress our bodies with physical exertion, our brain matter responds by producing a substance called brain derived neurotrophic factor, which we’ll call “Miracle Gro” for the brain for simplicity’s sake. This “Miracle Gro” stimulates the brain to birth new cells so that we can, in effect, build a bigger mental muscle.
It’s never too late to replenish your lost brain cells. One scientific study placed a group of sedentary, 71 year old men on a weekly exercise regime. Over the next six years these men showed a 50% decrease in the occurrence of dementia when compared to their non-exercising counterparts.
So what do you say we both get our bodies moving so we can move away from mental decline?