How Your Exercise Today Gives A Brain Boost Tomorrow

Regular 10almonds readers may remember we not long back wrote about a study that showed how daily activity levels, in aggregate, make a difference to brain health over the course of 1–2 weeks (in fact, it was a 9-day study):

Daily Activity Levels & The Measurable Difference They Make To Brain Health

Today, we’re going to talk about a new (published today, at time of writing) study that shows the associations between daily exercise levels (amongst other things) and how well people performed in cognitive tests the next day.

By this we mean: they recorded exercise vs sedentary behavior vs sleep on a daily basis (using wearable tech to track it), and tested them daily with cognitive tests, and looked at how the previous day’s activities (or lack thereof) impacted the next day’s test results.

Notably, the sample was of older adults (aged 50–83). The sample size wasn’t huge but was statistically significant (n=76) and the researchers are of course calling for more studies to be done with more people.

What they found

To put their findings into few words:

• Consistent light exercise boosts general cognitive performance not just for hours (which was already known) but through the next day.
• More moderate or vigorous activity than usual in particular led to better working memory and episodic memory the next day.
• More sleep (especially slow-wave deep sleep) improved episodic memory and psychomotor speed.
• Sedentary behavior was associated with poorer working memory.

Let’s define some terms:

• general cognitive performance = average of scores across the different tests
• working memory = very short term memory, such as remembering what you came into this room for, or (as an example of a test format) being able to take down a multi-digit number in one go without it being broken down (and then, testing with longer lengths of number until failure)
• episodic memory = memory of events in a narrative context, where and when they happened, etc
• psychomotor speed = the speed of connection between perception and reaction in quick-response tests

These are, of course, all useful things to have, which means the general advice here is to:

• move more, generally
• exercise more, specifically
• sit less, whenever reasonably possible
• sleep well

You can read the study itself here:

Associations of accelerometer-measured physical activity, sedentary behaviour, and sleep with next-day cognitive performance in older adults: a micro-longitudinal study

Want to know the best kind of exercise for brain health?

Check out our article about neuroscientist Dr. Suzuki, and what she has to say about it:

The Exercise That Protects Your Brain

Enjoy!