What Exercise Does For Your Memory

…and more, but we’ll be focussing on this oft-forgotten aspect today:

Body & brain

Your brain is, of course, part of your body. And exercise helps it in quite a number of ways.

First of all, as regular 10almonds readers will remember, what’s good for your heart is good for your brain. We’ve written a lot about this before so we’ll not repeat ourselves here, but if you’re “just tuning in”, so to speak, you can catch up here: What’s Your Vascular Dementia Risk? and you can also know that a lot of it has to do with both halves of the process:

• The circulatory system’s ability to feed the brain cells with oxygen and nutrients
• The circulatory system’s ability to take away detritus from the brain that’s been oozed out by the glymphatic system (see: How To Clean Your Brain: A Glymphatic Health Primer) but does still then have to be taken the rest of the way out somehow, and that means a ride in the bloodstream to go access the usual breakdown-and-excretory processes.

So with that in mind, you might want to step up some cardio! But it’s not just cardio! It’s been established that doing strength-training (for example, lifting weights or doing calisthenics)can improve brain health too; see: Can Strength Training Fight Dementia?

For more on how each approach offers different benefits, see: Cardio vs Strength Training: Which Is Better For Brain Health? ← it depends on which aspect(s) of brain health!

Putting it all together

Researchers (Dr. Nicholas Fabiano et al.) did a research review about this quite recently, looking into how improve brain function through better cardiovascular and cerebrovascular health, metabolic regulation, reduced inflammation, and neuroplasticity, as well as changes in neurotrophic factors and muscle-derived signaling molecules known to their friends as myokines.

The whole paper is quite fascinating, but there are some parts of it that stand out rather:

• The muscle–brain connection: contracting skeletal muscle releases myokines that interact with metabolic, inflammatory, neuroendocrine, and neurotrophic pathways involved in mood and cognition; exercise can also benefit brain health through improved sleep, circadian regulation, self-efficacy, and social connection.
• Exercise for memory and brain structure: a randomized trial* in older adults found that aerobic exercise increased anterior hippocampal volume and improved memory, while broader research links physical activity with cognitive performance and executive function.
  • *And we love to see them, so here it is: Exercise training increases size of hippocampus and improves memory
• Exercise vs depression and anxiety: randomized trials and meta-analyses suggest that exercise reduces depressive symptoms, anxiety, and psychological distress. Indeed, a 2024 network meta-analysis*) found benefits from walking, jogging, yoga, and strength training, with generally greater effects at higher intensities. Prospective studies also associate higher physical activity with a lower risk of developing depression, with benefits associated with approximately 75 minutes of moderate-intensity activity per week—albeit we’d be negligent to not mention that these are observational studies, and thus cannot strictly establish causation.
  • *Once again, you don’t have to take our word for it; here it is: Effect of exercise for depression: systematic review and network meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials
• Exercise vs cognitive decline and dementia: physical activity is associated with a lower risk of cognitive impairment, dementia, and Alzheimer’s disease, and as the authors note, even the WHO recommends physical activity as part of its strategy to reduce cognitive decline and dementia risk.

For more on these and other benefits too, you can read the paper in full at: Exercise is critical for brain health

Want to learn more?

For a much deeper dive, you might like this book that we reviewed a little while back:

Healthy Heart, Healthy Brain: The Personalized Path to Protect Your Memory, Prevent Heart Attacks and Strokes, and Avoid Chronic Illness – by Dr. Amy Doneen & Dr. Bradley Bale

Take care!