Protect Your Brain with This Activity

A new study, published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, may encourage you to move more to protect your brain—with only a modest amount of movement required to reap the benefits.

Researchers in the U.K. studied different types of daily movement (sedentary behavior, light intensity physical activity, and moderate and vigorous physical activity) on overall cognition, memory, and executive function.

They found that replacing sitting, sleeping or gentle movement with less than 10 minutes of moderate to vigorous activity (e.g., brisk walking, bicycling, running up and down stairs, aerobic dancing, jogging, running, swimming) can protect your brain and improve working memory and executive processes like planning and organization. The intensity of the exercise matters, and study participants who engaged in light physical activity rather than more vigorous activity saw declines in cognitive performance. However, light activity is still more beneficial than sitting.

The data was taken from the 1970 British Cohort Study, an ongoing study that tracks the health of a group of U.K.-born adults. The group of nearly 4,500 participants consented, at age 46, to wear an activity tracker and complete verbal memory and executive functioning tests and were followed from 2016 to 2018.