Lately, I have spent a great deal of time looking at the impact of exercise on the function of the brain for a new project in which I am currently involved.  I have recently been turned onto the work of Dr. John Ratey, who is with Harvard Medical school and is the author of the book Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain in which he discusses the evidence relating learning, behavior, neuroscience, and movement.  If you are working within the realm of exercise and fitness, regardless of your population, these are things you should understand.

A few cool things I’ve learned in the process:

Exercise can improve optimism, focus, motivation, and patience by influencing neurotransmitter quantities.  It is like taking a bit of Ritalin and a bit of Prozac.  It has the ability to combat depression, ADHD, and other cognitive impairments as good as medicine after four weeks, but after 10 months, the exercise group was better than the medicated group.  Exercise enhances self-confidence, working capacity (by 17%), increases stress reserve, and vigor.  Exercised rats are more persistent and recover more quickly from letdown, and children/adolescents who exercise score better on standardized tests than those who do not and there is a positive correlation between fitness and test scores independent of socioeconomic status.

There are three different ways that exercise impacts our ability to learn.  It increases our ability to pay attention via improving the brain’s “systems” of attention, motivation, memory, frontal cortex use (and size), and more.  Exercise facilitates new connections in the brain by providing the most fertile environment of neurotransmitters, neurotropins (BDNFs, GCLDNFs, …) which help serve as “building blocks of learning.”  Finally, exercise helps facilitate new cellular growth in the brain (that is full of endogenous stem cells activated by products of muscle contraction like IGF-1, vascular endothelial growth factor, fibroblast growth factor, and ANP) that makes the brain more “plastic.”

Exercise decreased aggression, acting out in schools, and increased the size and ability of cerebellum to do its job.  Ultimately, acute exercise improves short term focus, but in the long term, exercise increases the brains capacity to learn and process information.  It is undeniable.

Have a great weekend,
Carson Boddicker

Boddicker Performance