How to Use Exercise to Improve Your Brain’s Health, Longevity & Performance

0:00:04 Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools
0:00:06 for everyday life.
0:00:13 I’m Andrew Huberman, and I’m a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford
0:00:15 School of Medicine.
0:00:20 Today we are discussing exercise and brain health, which includes brain longevity and
0:00:25 brain performance, our ability to learn new information over long periods of time and
0:00:27 indeed into old age.
0:00:32 Today we are going to discuss how different forms of exercise, resistance training, cardiovascular
0:00:37 training of both long, medium, and short duration can be used to improve the way that your brain
0:00:43 functions acutely, meaning immediately in the minutes and hours and the day that you
0:00:49 do that exercise, as well as in the long term, in the days, weeks, and months after you perform
0:00:50 that exercise.
0:00:55 And of course, if you’re exercising regularly, the effects of exercise on brain health and
0:01:00 performance compound over time, making you better able to learn things, better able to
0:01:05 retain information from the past, and indeed to expand your brain’s capacity to learn
0:01:08 new types of information in new ways.
0:01:13 In researching today’s episode, I quickly came to realize that the number of studies
0:01:18 that have explored the relationship between exercise, brain performance, and brain health,
0:01:22 as well as the range of different types of exercise that have been explored in that context
0:01:24 is extremely vast.
0:01:29 There are literally tens of thousands of studies on this topic, as well as meta-analyses
0:01:34 and reviews, all of which point to positive effects of doing exercise of various types
0:01:37 on brain health and performance.
0:01:42 Within those many, many studies, you’ll find many, many different exercise protocols that
0:01:45 lead to improvements in brain performance and longevity.
0:01:50 So the goal of today’s episode is to synthesize that vast amount of information into a logical
0:01:56 framework that simplifies it and clarifies it and places it within the context of specific
0:02:02 mechanisms, both neurobiological mechanisms and endocrine-based mechanisms, that together
0:02:07 can very well explain the data on how exercise impacts brain health and longevity, such that
0:02:11 by the end of today’s episode, you’ll have both some specific recommendations about how
0:02:16 to use exercise for sake of brain health and performance that I believe will be new to
0:02:20 most of you, as well as the ability to think about the mechanisms and the logical framework
0:02:25 that wraps around this incredibly large literature on exercise and brain performance so that
0:02:30 you can customize your exercise program on the basis of how much time you have available,
0:02:35 your specific age, your health status, and the specific types of brain changes that you
0:02:38 might be seeking through the use of exercise.
0:02:42 And I should also say that by learning how exercise impacts brain performance and brain
0:02:47 health, you’re also going to learn some of the incredible ways that your body communicates
0:02:51 with your brain and your brain communicates with your body, not just during exercise but
0:02:52 all of the time.
0:02:56 So today, you’re going to learn a lot of practical tools, of course, about exercise, brain health,
0:02:57 and longevity.
0:03:01 It’s based on research that is incredibly interesting, in some cases surprising, and
0:03:04 in almost all cases, actionable.
0:03:09 As some of you may already know, I have a book coming out this year, 2025, entitled “Protocols,
0:03:12 an Operating Manual for the Human Body.”
0:03:14 I’m super excited about the book.
0:03:18 It includes protocols, that is, actionable steps that anyone can take to improve their
0:03:24 sleep, motivation, creativity, gut microbiome, nutrition, exercise, stress modulation, and
0:03:25 much more.
0:03:28 Now, the book was originally scheduled to be released in April of 2025.
0:03:33 However, to make sure that the book reflects the latest scientific research, I’ve decided
0:03:37 to expand on the, yes, already finished version of the book to make sure that the protocols
0:03:42 are as up-to-date as possible and reflect the most modern and best findings.
0:03:47 So the new release date for protocols is going to be September of 2025.
0:03:51 I do apologize for the delay in release, but I assure you that I will make it worth your
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0:03:56 To learn more about the book or to secure a copy by presale, go to protocolsbook.com.
0:04:01 There, you’ll find all the information about the book, as well as the various languages
0:04:03 that the book will be translated into.
0:04:07 Before we begin, I’d like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching
0:04:09 and research roles at Stanford.
0:04:13 It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information
0:04:16 about science and science-related tools to the general public.
0:04:20 In keeping with that theme, I’d like to thank the sponsors of today’s podcast.
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0:04:30 Now, I’ve been doing weekly therapy for well over 30 years.
0:04:33 Therapy is an extremely important component to overall health.
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0:06:59 Okay, let’s talk about the relationship between exercise, brain health and longevity,
0:07:00 and performance.
0:07:05 Let’s just take a couple of minutes and really clearly define what we mean by exercise, because
0:07:09 most of us have a concept of what exercise is, but for sake of understanding the relationship
0:07:14 between exercise and brain performance, most of the peer-reviewed studies focus on two
0:07:19 general categories of exercise, either cardiovascular exercise or resistance training.
0:07:25 Now, of course, cardiovascular exercise can be a very short duration, high intensity,
0:07:30 so getting heart rates up way, way, way up, or longer duration, lower intensity.
0:07:34 Now typically, the amount of time scales with that, so the shorter intensity stuff tends
0:07:40 to be quick bouts of either 30 seconds, 60 seconds, sometimes two minutes, or even four
0:07:46 minutes, all out effort with some period of rest afterwards, or longer duration, 20,
0:07:52 30, 45, or even 60 minutes of cardiovascular training at a more steady state, lower intensity.
0:07:55 And I should mention that within the tens of thousands of studies that are out there
0:08:01 exploring the relationship between exercise and brain health and longevity, you will mostly
0:08:07 see studies focused on cardiovascular exercise, and most of those studies early on were focused
0:08:09 on the longer duration, lower intensity stuff.
0:08:16 So typically 30 to 60 minutes of lower intensity, yet still elevating the heart rate exercise.
0:08:21 Nowadays, there’s more of a focus on the high intensity interval training, and today we’re
0:08:25 even going to hear about some studies that involve very, very short bursts, so-called
0:08:29 sprints of activity, a short of six seconds long, followed by a period of rest, repeated
0:08:35 for a number of times, and exploring what the effect of that sort of, I should say, very,
0:08:41 very short intensity exercise is on immediate and long-term brain health and performance.
0:08:45 Okay, so cardiovascular training of different durations and intensities involving different
0:08:49 durations of rest are one category that we’re going to talk about today.
0:08:53 The other category of exercise we’re going to talk about today is resistance training.
0:08:59 Now most of the studies involving resistance training and their effects on the brain, both
0:09:05 brain longevity and brain performance, focus on either compounds, so multi-joint movements,
0:09:09 also think squats, deadlifts, bench press, shoulder press, dips, et cetera.
0:09:14 But very often, and this is just a byproduct of how studies are done in the laboratory,
0:09:19 very often the exploration of the relationship between resistance training and brain health
0:09:25 and longevity are single-joint isolation exercises, like a single leg leg extension, even.
0:09:29 You might be thinking, wait, just one leg doing the leg extension?
0:09:30 Yes.
0:09:33 The reason for that, and I spoke to some of the scientists that do this sort of work,
0:09:39 is that when they have subjects do a, say, seated single-leg leg extension as the form
0:09:43 of resistance training, I know I and some of you are probably chuckling, like, really,
0:09:46 of all the things you could select to see if it impacts brain health, you’re going to
0:09:48 have people kick up one knee.
0:09:49 Yep, you do that.
0:09:50 Why?
0:09:51 Well, most people can do that type of movement.
0:09:54 It doesn’t take any training, or it just takes a little bit of direction as to how
0:09:59 to do it, so it can be done reasonably safely by many people, including people that are non-athletes,
0:10:04 often older than 65 years old, not that there aren’t some very fit 65-year-olds, but just
0:10:08 people who are older than 65 but don’t have a lot of athletic background, can sit down
0:10:14 in a chair, put the pin at the appropriate weight, and move their knee, or rather, elevate
0:10:19 their foot while seated in a chair, so-called single-leg leg extension, and also it gives
0:10:25 the benefit of the opposite leg within subject control for comparison in terms of strength
0:10:26 increases.
0:10:30 Okay, so, set aside any kind of, you know, like, eye rolls or chuckles that you might
0:10:35 have about single-leg leg extensions as the total form of resistance training that’s being
0:10:40 explored, because, yes, those studies are still informative, in fact, they perhaps even identified
0:10:44 the lower threshold for the amount of resistance training and type of resistance training that
0:10:49 could benefit the brain, but we also see studies that involve compound exercises, so having
0:10:54 people do free weight squats, or even weighted squats, or deadlifts, or, you know, bench
0:10:59 press dip, deadlift type combinations, again, when you look at the literature exploring
0:11:03 exercise and brain health, you’re looking at studies that, in the best cases, are very
0:11:09 tightly controlled, that typically means having people do them in the laboratory in a very
0:11:14 specific way, sometimes using untrained subjects, meaning when the subjects arrive at the study,
0:11:18 they haven’t done much exercise of that sort, sometimes it’s involving trained subjects,
0:11:23 they both have their caveats, of course, but keep in mind that during today’s discussion,
0:11:29 I’m going to be pooling, at many times, across all these studies, exploring cardiovascular
0:11:34 exercise of different duration and intensities, resistance training of different types, and
0:11:39 sometimes different intensities as well, but where there is a specific piece of knowledge
0:11:43 that can be gleaned from understanding the exact type of exercise that was done and a
0:11:48 specific type of brain change, especially in cases where it’s been shown to be especially
0:11:51 beneficial, I will be sure to highlight that.
0:11:56 So as we proceed in today’s discussion, keep in mind, exercise is many things, two general
0:12:02 categories, most of the studies focus on high intensity or low intensity cardio, most of
0:12:08 the studies involve either single joint isolation exercises, sometimes even single joint single
0:12:14 leg isolation exercises, or compound exercises, and keep in mind that most of the studies
0:12:19 exploring the relationship between exercise and brain health and performance are done
0:12:25 to explore two types of changes, either what are called acute changes, meaning immediate
0:12:29 changes, so they have people do the exercise and then they have them take a cognitive test,
0:12:33 or some other form of test that analyzes brain health and performance, or they look at chronic
0:12:38 effects, which are what are the changes in brain performance and health over long periods
0:12:43 of time, meaning having people do a particular type of exercise anywhere from two to four
0:12:48 times per week, although typically it’s three times per week, and doing that for anywhere
0:12:53 from four weeks to six months, again all of this relates to the practical aspects of running
0:12:55 controlled studies in the laboratory.
0:12:58 So if by now you’re thinking this is really complicated, how is it that we’re supposed
0:13:03 to tease out the best things to do given this huge ball of barbed wire of different types
0:13:07 of studies, variables, et cetera, well I assure you we are going to make this very clear and
0:13:13 very actionable, and the thing to keep in mind is that fortunately, most all of the studies
0:13:17 yes, most all of the studies that have explored the relationship between exercise, brain health
0:13:21 and longevity and performance, find positive effects.
0:13:25 Now for some of you who are skeptics, you might be thinking, well great, so you can
0:13:29 do any form of exercise, well in some sense yes, I’ll actually tell you this right off
0:13:36 the bat, there are good data showing that if people do six second sprints, max all out
0:13:44 sprints on a stationary bicycle, followed by one minute rest, and repeat that six times,
0:13:49 you see significant acute effects on brain performance.
0:13:53 So the brain performance could be a memory task, sometimes it is a memory task, it could
0:13:56 be what’s called a stroke task, which is a cognitive flexibility task where you have
0:14:01 to distinguish between the colors that words are written in and the content of the words,
0:14:04 okay so called stroke task, I’ve talked about this on previous podcasts, I’ll talk about
0:14:08 that a little bit more later, regardless of the cognitive tests that’s used, that very
0:14:13 short duration, high intensity training, increases performance significantly.
0:14:19 As well, 20 or 30 minutes of so called steady state cardio, figuring out how fast you can
0:14:26 run or row or swim or stationary bike for 20 to 30 minutes at a steady state, and then
0:14:30 you analyze people’s cognitive performance on a memory task and be a working memory task,
0:14:34 so remembering a short string of numbers, or it could be math problems, it could be the
0:14:38 stroke task, any number of different tasks reveal the same thing, which is that the longer
0:14:44 duration, lower intensity cardio also significantly improves performance.
0:14:49 Does that mean that you can do six rounds of six seconds of sprinting with a minute in
0:14:54 between or 20 minutes of cardiovascular exercise and get the same effect on brain performance?
0:14:59 Well, if you’re just looking at overall improvements in performance, so for instance the percentage
0:15:03 of information that you learn, if you do or you don’t do the exercise, or if you compare
0:15:08 those two forms of exercise that I just mentioned, in that sense, yes, it really doesn’t make
0:15:11 a difference, which may have you scratching your head, but in a few moments, I’ll explain
0:15:13 why that is.
0:15:18 On the other hand, different forms of exercise, of course, impact our bodily health differently.
0:15:22 Higher intensity, shorter duration exercise, of course, impacts things like VO2 max and
0:15:27 which circulating hormones and neuromodulators are going to be present very differently than
0:15:30 longer duration, lower intensity exercise.
0:15:36 VO2, if you have people do single joint isolation resistance training exercises, like a single
0:15:42 leg leg extension or both legs leg extension, versus 10 sets of 10 in a squat exercise,
0:15:46 you’re going to see very different specific adaptations at the physical level, at the
0:15:53 bodily level, but in every case, where you explore the acute, the immediate changes that
0:15:59 occur in brain output and function, after people do that sort of exercise, you’re going
0:16:00 to see significant increases.
0:16:07 When one does physical exercise, short duration, high intensity, cardio, or higher intensity
0:16:12 resistance training, single joint training, compound training, single joint isolation
0:16:17 exercises, compound exercises, one sees these increases in brain performance, at least acutely
0:16:20 in the immediate stage after the training.
0:16:25 So we have to ask ourselves, why is it, how is it that all these different forms of exercise
0:16:29 are positively impacting brain performance?
0:16:36 And the answer is very simple, and fortunately gives us tremendous leverage over our exercise
0:16:38 and how to impact our brain health.
0:16:41 And the answer is arousal.
0:16:46 However, the answer isn’t entirely arousal, meaning not all of the positive effects of
0:16:51 exercise on brain health, longevity, and performance can be explained by arousal.
0:16:54 But when I step back from the literature, again, an enormous literature, tens of thousands
0:16:58 of peer-reviewed papers, many of which are done exceptionally well, by the way, as well
0:17:05 as meta-analyses and reviews, I think it’s fair to say that probably 60 to 70% of the
0:17:10 effects of exercise on brain health, performance, and longevity can be explained by the specific
0:17:17 shifts in our physiology, both bodily physiology and directly within the brain’s physiology
0:17:22 during those bouts of exercise, which is this increase in so-called autonomic arousal, which
0:17:29 occurs during the exercise, but also extends into a window after the exercise is completed.
0:17:33 So we have to talk about this relationship between exercise, arousal, and acute brain
0:17:38 performance, meaning the improvements in brain performance that happen immediately after
0:17:39 the exercise.
0:17:43 And then we’ll shift our focus to the effects of exercise that occur more chronically.
0:17:48 That is, the effects of exercise on brain health and performance that occur in the hours,
0:17:53 days, weeks, and years after we exercise, even if we are continuing to exercise every
0:17:58 day or three times a week, or whatever the frequency might be.
0:18:02 But this issue of arousal is extremely important, and I assure you it’s not trivial.
0:18:06 In fact, it will help you understand a number of things in the domains of deliberate cold
0:18:11 exposure, stress, trauma, and most importantly, for today’s discussion, it will help you design
0:18:16 an exercise program that’s geared towards giving you the maximum bodily health effects
0:18:19 and the maximum brain health effects.
0:18:24 Okay, in order to understand the relationship between exercise, arousal, and learning, we
0:18:28 have to really clarify the relationship between arousal and learning.
0:18:31 That’s going to set the stage for pretty much everything else we’re going to talk about
0:18:32 for the next 10 minutes or so.
0:18:34 And it’s oh, so cool.
0:18:40 It also gives me the opportunity to review a paper that I’ve long loved, which comes
0:18:44 from Larry Cahill’s group down at UC Irvine entitled Enhanced Memory Consolidation with
0:18:48 Post-Learning Stress Interaction with the Degree of Arousal at Encoding.
0:18:52 This is just one of several papers from the Cahill group, which essentially identified
0:18:53 the following.
0:18:57 There are a couple of different ways you can increase so-called autonomic arousal or levels
0:18:58 of alertness.
0:19:02 Sometimes it’s called stress, but autonomic arousal is simply an increase in the amount
0:19:05 of activity in the so-called sympathetic arm or the autonomic nervous system, which is
0:19:12 nerd speak for more alert, more aroused, wide-eyed, ready to move, higher heart rate, higher blood
0:19:13 pressure, more alertness.
0:19:18 This is a great state to be in for learning material provided it’s not too much alertness,
0:19:21 too much arousal.
0:19:26 Turns out this paper shows it’s also a great state to be in after you’ve been exposed to
0:19:28 material that you want to learn.
0:19:31 And it’s also the case that in this paper and in many, many other papers from this and
0:19:37 other laboratories, that you can increase levels of autonomic arousal by having people
0:19:41 put their arm into ice water for one to three minutes, the so-called cold pressure test.
0:19:45 It’s a very commonly used standard test.
0:19:50 This paper and many other papers show that it leads to very rapid and significant increases
0:19:54 in circulating levels of cortisol, which, yes, sometimes is called a stress hormone,
0:19:57 but it’s really just a hormone involved in the stress response, but it does a bunch of
0:19:58 other things, too.
0:20:04 So they use that as a tool after people have been exposed to certain types of information
0:20:09 to ask, does elevation in cortisol, a.k.a. autonomic arousal, improve one’s ability to
0:20:11 remember information?
0:20:13 And the answer is yes.
0:20:15 This study shows that.
0:20:18 Several other studies from the Cahill and other laboratories show that sometimes those studies
0:20:22 use people putting their arm into ice cold water.
0:20:28 Other times they’ll inject them with a drug that increases adrenaline, also called epinephrine.
0:20:30 Sometimes also increases cortisol.
0:20:37 The point being that elevations in autonomic arousal, after one is exposed to information,
0:20:43 increases one’s memory for that information and one’s memory for the details of that information.
0:20:47 Now in this particular study, they compared emotionally-laden versus non-emotionally-laden
0:20:50 information and a bunch of other details, which are interesting if you choose to peruse
0:20:51 this study.
0:20:54 But I should mention that other studies from this and other laboratories have shown time
0:21:01 and time again increases in autonomic arousal measured by increases in cortisol or adrenaline,
0:21:07 also called epinephrine, or norepinephrine, which is a sort of analog within the brain,
0:21:12 that consistently leads to better memory for information that one has been exposed to,
0:21:17 better memory for the details of that information, and oftentimes better ability to work with
0:21:21 that information, to come up with new ideas with that information or to think logically
0:21:23 about that information in new ways.
0:21:28 In other words, increasing autonomic arousal improves learning and memory.
0:21:32 Now it’s also very important to understand that that increase in autonomic arousal can
0:21:38 improve learning and memory if the autonomic arousal occurs after the exposure to the material.
0:21:39 Most people find that a bit surprising.
0:21:41 I certainly did when I first read this paper.
0:21:45 It makes sense if you start to think about the persistence of memories for things like
0:21:47 traumas or bad events, right?
0:21:51 Bad event happens and there’s this big spike in cortisol and adrenaline, and those memories
0:21:52 are hard to eradicate.
0:21:55 They’re certainly hard to remove the emotional content from.
0:22:00 And if you think about it, in those instances, the event happens and then comes the big increase
0:22:01 in cortisol and adrenaline.
0:22:05 And that maps very well onto the study that I’m describing here.
0:22:10 In addition, however, lots of studies have shown that increasing autonomic arousal as
0:22:15 measured by increases in adrenaline or cortisol or both or any number of different measures
0:22:21 of autonomic arousal that occurs during the exposure to the new material.
0:22:22 Okay.
0:22:23 So this isn’t trauma.
0:22:28 This is like new math material, new history material, new music material, new motor skill
0:22:32 material that you’re trying to learn.
0:22:36 Increases in autonomic arousal that occur as you’re trying to so-called encode the information,
0:22:41 you’re being exposed to that new information, also significantly improve learning.
0:22:44 And it’s always through increases in arousal.
0:22:49 In other words, whether or not you’re measuring cortisol, adrenaline, heart rate, blood pressure,
0:22:55 galvanic skin response, how wide someone’s pupils are or small someone’s pupils are,
0:22:59 or any combination of those things or any other measures of autonomic arousal, the consistent
0:23:07 takeaway is increases in arousal during or after, in particular after.
0:23:12 Trying to learn a certain material is going to improve significantly the amount of material
0:23:18 that one learns, the details of that material and the persistence of that learning over time.
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0:26:06 Okay, so now we’ve established the elevated levels of autonomic arousal either during
0:26:12 or after and indeed also before about of learning, the so-called encoding phase of learning
0:26:17 when we’re exposed to the new material that we want to learn and remember, are all beneficial.
0:26:19 This is wonderful news.
0:26:23 When we look out on the whole of the literature, on the relationship between exercise and brain
0:26:29 health and performance, we see studies that incorporate exercise either before or after
0:26:30 about of learning.
0:26:35 And we also find studies, believe it or not, that combine exercise with learning in real
0:26:39 time, literally exposing people to new material that they’re expected to learn or trying to
0:26:44 learn while they’re walking on a treadmill or running on a treadmill or cycling or rowing.
0:26:49 Yes, those studies have also been done, although for practical reasons, they’re not as numerous
0:26:53 as the studies exploring the relationship between exercise and learning where the exercise
0:26:56 is done before or after the bout of learning.
0:26:58 Okay, so what this means is wonderful.
0:27:03 What this means is that if you want to use exercise, not just for enhancing your bodily
0:27:08 health, but also for brain health and performance, you can do that exercise before, during or
0:27:11 after bout of learning.
0:27:13 That allows you to look at the constraints of your life.
0:27:17 For instance, are you one of these people that can get up at five or six or seven AM
0:27:22 and exercise before everyone else gets up or before your workday starts or your school
0:27:27 day starts, do a round of exercise and then get into your bout of learning, whatever that
0:27:31 material may be, or are you somebody who has to dive into the workday, school day, family
0:27:36 obligations, etc., in which case you might only be able to exercise later in the day,
0:27:39 but you’re probably still somebody who would like to enhance their brain health and performance,
0:27:43 so in that case, you might organize the thing that you’re trying to learn, the encoding or
0:27:47 the exposure to the thing that you’re trying to learn, either in written forms or you’re
0:27:52 reading or you’re listening to it or you’re attending a class or classes, and then exercising
0:27:56 after you’re exposed to that material in order to get that elevated levels of arousal, not
0:28:01 unlike the arrangement of the studies that I was talking about earlier, which use the
0:28:07 ice exposure in order to generate increases in arousal and thereby to improve learning
0:28:08 and memory.
0:28:12 So in the show note captions for this episode, we’ve batched a number of different references
0:28:17 that have explored the relationship between exercise and cognitive performance.
0:28:21 And across those studies and the ones that are referenced therein, you’ll find studies
0:28:27 where the exercise bout was done before or the exercise bout was done during or the exercise
0:28:32 bout was done after a round of learning or encoding of information.
0:28:36 And I should mention that different studies focus on different cognitive tasks.
0:28:40 So exercise and the arousal associated with exercise has been shown to acutely improve
0:28:48 recall, so just raw recall of material, the details in material, it’s been shown to improve
0:28:50 cognitive flexibility through things like the stroke task.
0:28:56 And so in a very convenient way, exercise has been shown to acutely improve performance
0:29:02 on all those sorts of brain and memory tasks, which is greatly reassuring to all of us because
0:29:07 what it means is that it probably doesn’t matter so much when you do your exercise or
0:29:08 what it is that you’re trying to learn.
0:29:12 It’s going to be beneficial as long as the thing that you’re trying to learn and the
0:29:15 exercise are positioned fairly closely in time.
0:29:20 Now the one caveat to that is that several studies have explored the relationship between
0:29:26 short duration, high intensity interval training and cognitive performance, in particular executive
0:29:30 function, that cognitive prefrontal flexibility that we were talking about a few moments ago.
0:29:38 And on the whole, all of those studies point to improvements in executive control and function,
0:29:42 so that context dependent switching of knowledge and your ability to think about things in a
0:29:47 very agile way, if you will, if people did a high intensity interval training session
0:29:52 just before they do that bout of cognitive flexibility learning.
0:29:56 However, several studies have also looked at the effect of repeated bouts of high intensity
0:30:00 interval training, and in some cases looking at the mechanisms by which high intensity
0:30:03 interval training improved cognitive performance.
0:30:07 And the basic takeaway is the following, and again, I’ll provide references to these in
0:30:12 the show note captions, that high intensity interval training done before or believe it
0:30:17 or not even during cognitive flexibility tasks, a couple of studies have actually explored
0:30:20 that, significantly improves performance on those tasks.
0:30:26 Again, we believe this is likely through enhanced levels of arousal, although some data also
0:30:31 point to the fact that it’s also likely through enhanced cerebral blood flow, simply more
0:30:36 blood being delivered to the brain during or in particular after high intensity interval
0:30:41 training, more blood, more fuel and other molecules being delivered to the brain during
0:30:45 a cognitive task or cognitive flexibility tasks, makes sense why that would improve
0:30:47 cognitive function.
0:30:51 And yet when studies have explored the consequence of doing multiple high intensity interval
0:30:56 training sessions, and when I say high intensity, I mean high intensity, these are studies where
0:31:00 lactate is elevated, we’ll talk more about lactate in a few minutes, where typically
0:31:04 people’s heart rate is either close to or at their maximum heart rate for some period
0:31:09 of time, either 30 seconds, 60 seconds, two minutes, or in some cases, people are pushing
0:31:13 really, really hard for four minutes, then resting for four minutes, then pushing really
0:31:17 hard for four minutes, then resting for four minutes, four times over the so-called four
0:31:20 by four program that I know a number of you have heard about.
0:31:23 If you haven’t, it’s very intense, so you can imagine all out for four minutes, then
0:31:25 rest, all out for four minutes, then rest.
0:31:31 Doing that several times in a day, okay, so two bouts of four by four or two high intensity
0:31:37 interval training sessions of any kind has been shown to diminish cognitive performance
0:31:42 if the cognitive task comes after the second high intensity interval training session.
0:31:47 Now for most of us, including me, that makes sense, I think, well, they’re tired, you know,
0:31:51 people aren’t able to focus as much because they’re devoting all this energy to the exercise.
0:31:55 And indeed, that’s true, although the mechanism is interesting, the studies that have looked
0:31:59 at this have actually found that cerebral blood flow during the two bouts of high intensity
0:32:02 interval training are more or less equal.
0:32:07 So it’s not that the first session necessarily precludes high performance in the high intensity
0:32:11 interval training session in the second session, but then when you go on to try and do a cognitive
0:32:17 task that’s demanding and also requires elevated levels of cerebral blood flow, you find that
0:32:22 performance drops and this is correlated with reductions in cerebral blood flow that come
0:32:25 from doing too much high intensity interval training.
0:32:29 Now I have to acknowledge that most people aren’t doing multiple high intensity interval
0:32:34 training sessions per day, but this is a reminder, an important reminder in fact, that if you’re
0:32:39 using exercise to try and improve brain health and function, or even if you’re just somebody
0:32:43 who’s exercising but is also expected to use their brain to learn things throughout the
0:32:46 day as most of us are and to attend to things throughout the day, you need to be cautious
0:32:50 about not overdoing the high intensity interval training sessions.
0:32:53 This is also true for resistance training.
0:32:57 You need to be aware that very high intensity exercise, yes, increases cerebral blood flow
0:33:02 and the delivery of all these fuels and other compounds to your brain during the exercise.
0:33:07 If you do that correctly and you don’t overdo it, you can capture some of that wave of blood
0:33:14 flow, fuel, et cetera, as you enter the learning session, but if you “overdo it,” then you’re
0:33:19 going to arrive to that bout of learning with reduced cerebral blood flow and you’re going
0:33:23 to be in a state that it’s very difficult to focus and learn new information.
0:33:29 So there is such a thing as too much arousal from exercise that leads to troughs and arousal
0:33:32 that diminish cognitive performance and learning.
0:33:35 Now all of this is focused, of course, on the relationship between exercise and brain
0:33:38 function at the acute level, the immediate level.
0:33:43 It’s fair to say that all high intensity exercise and resistance training is going to support
0:33:47 brain function in the chronic sense, in the long-term sense, in fact, the literature points
0:33:48 to that.
0:33:51 And once again, I’ve batched the references for this episode so that they’re grouped
0:33:54 together according to the specific topics and timestamps.
0:33:57 And the two studies that I recommend you look at if you’re interested in this relationship
0:34:02 between high intensity training and cognitive function, in particular, executive function,
0:34:06 that cognitive flexibility I was talking about earlier, such as in the Stroop task, there’s
0:34:11 a wonderful article entitled “Executive Function After Exhaustive Exercise,” that’s one to
0:34:12 look at.
0:34:15 And the other one, which I think is really nice and therefore I’ve placed there, really
0:34:21 points to the way that a single bout of exercise can acutely improve brain function, in particular
0:34:22 executive function.
0:34:26 And the title of that paper, not surprisingly, is a single bout of resistance exercise can
0:34:29 enhance episodic memory performance.
0:34:30 Here’s a fun one.
0:34:35 As I continue to hammer on this thesis that so many of the positive effects of exercise
0:34:40 on brain health and performance, at least in the acute sense, immediately after the exercise,
0:34:45 in some cases during the exercise, are due to arousal, well, then it should make sense
0:34:50 why things like so-called exercise snacks, this idea that throughout the day, you suddenly
0:34:56 do 25 quick jumping jacks, or you jump up and down five times, or you do 20 air squats.
0:35:01 We’ve heard about exercise snacks in different contexts, such as adjusting blood glucose levels,
0:35:06 you hear a lot about that, after meals, take a walk, or do some jumping jacks really quick,
0:35:11 or do 20 air squats throughout the day, and people talk about the sort of outsized positive
0:35:12 effects of those.
0:35:13 Well, check this out.
0:35:17 When it comes to high intensity interval training and positive effects on cognitive performance,
0:35:21 there’s a study entitled “The Influence of Acute Sprint Interval Training on Cognitive
0:35:28 Performance in Healthy Younger Adults,” and this study has people do six-second all-out
0:35:29 efforts.
0:35:30 You heard that right.
0:35:31 Six seconds.
0:35:32 Okay?
0:35:35 So, six, six seconds, it always is tricky.
0:35:39 They always use the same numbers, the, you know, four by four by four, okay, six, yes,
0:35:47 the number six, six-second all-out efforts, sprinting on basically a stationary bike.
0:35:52 And then a period of rest of one minute between those six-second all-out efforts.
0:35:57 And they see a significant improvement in cognitive performance.
0:36:02 So, yes, it’s true that you can do very brief, very intense bouts of exercise.
0:36:07 I mean, just think about six seconds of sprinting, one minute of just cruise or rest, six seconds,
0:36:12 and then just repeat for six sprints total of six seconds each.
0:36:18 And experience an enhancement, that is an acute or immediate enhancement in cognitive function.
0:36:24 And I can imagine no other mechanistic explanation for that aside from increased levels of autonomic
0:36:25 arousal.
0:36:30 Any other mechanism that you could envision, you know, IGF-1, IRISIN, BDNF, things that
0:36:36 we’ll talk about in a few minutes, yes, those might be deployed as well.
0:36:42 But in terms of seeing something so brief, having such a fast action on cognitive performance
0:36:47 and given what you now know about the relationship between arousal focus and cognitive performance,
0:36:54 I’d be willing to stake, let’s say, six of my 10 fingers on the idea that it’s all due
0:36:56 to enhanced autonomic arousal.
0:37:01 Okay, let’s talk for a few minutes about the mechanisms by which exercise improves brain
0:37:03 health and performance.
0:37:07 And I realize when I say mechanism, some of you may say, “Okay, well, I just want to know
0:37:08 what to do.
0:37:09 I don’t need to hear about the mechanisms.”
0:37:15 But in this case, understanding just a little bit about the pathways by which exercise impacts
0:37:20 the brain can give you a ton of leverage in designing the best exercise schedule for your
0:37:25 brain health and performance and, frankly, for your exercise schedule generally to generate
0:37:30 things like fat loss, improvements in strength, hypertrophy, endurance, and so on.
0:37:33 In fact, let’s do this mental experiment together.
0:37:39 If we were to ask ourselves, “How is it that exercise improves brain health and performance?”
0:37:43 Based on what you know now, you’d probably say, “Well, it increases arousal, the catecholamine,
0:37:47 so dopamine, epinephrine, nor epinephrine.
0:37:51 It probably increases heart rate, so more blood pumping to the brain,” and so on and
0:37:52 so forth.
0:37:54 And you would be correct about all of that.
0:37:58 But let’s just think a little bit more deeply about how exercise actually impacts the brain
0:38:02 in the short and long term and ask ourselves, “What are the different physical pathways?
0:38:07 What are the different chemical pathways by which the movement of our body changes the
0:38:10 way that our brain works in the short and long term?”
0:38:15 So if we were to draw a stick figure of a human and orient ourselves to the different
0:38:22 locations or organs in the body that contain potential sources of information for the brain,
0:38:24 one place that we could start would be, of course, the heart.
0:38:29 When you do cardiovascular exercise of any kind, intense or not so intense, short or
0:38:32 long, your heart rate increases, your blood pressure increases.
0:38:36 Likewise, if you do resistance training, there will be heart rate increases, those heart
0:38:41 rate increases will come down between sets, but your heart rate tends to increase when
0:38:42 you exercise.
0:38:43 That’s sort of a duh.
0:38:48 Well, when your heart rate increases, there’s actually both increased blood flow to the
0:38:52 brain and the delivery of all the things that that blood carries.
0:38:56 But there are also neural pathways that carry signals about that heart rate, about those
0:39:01 blood pressure changes to the brain in order to increase our levels of alertness and focus
0:39:03 that we can leverage toward learning.
0:39:08 So the first location in the body that we know can communicate with the brain is the
0:39:09 heart.
0:39:13 When our heart beats faster, that’s communicated to our autonomic nervous system, which resides
0:39:14 in a number of different brain areas.
0:39:19 In fact, it’s a network of brain areas that act in concert to create what we call autonomic
0:39:20 arousal.
0:39:24 We also have another pathway that goes back from the brain to the heart and other organs
0:39:28 that we call the vagus nerve, which is a two directional pathway, you know, up from the
0:39:31 body to the brain and from the brain back to the body, we’re going to talk a lot about
0:39:32 the vagus.
0:39:35 In fact, let’s talk about the vagus now.
0:39:41 When we exercise, we release adrenaline, which is also called epinephrine from our adrenal
0:39:45 glands, which are small glands that reside atop both of our kidneys.
0:39:49 That adrenaline or epinephrine, as it’s also called, does many things in our body.
0:39:52 It’s responsible for increasing our heart rate further.
0:39:56 It’s responsible for a number of effects on the so-called endothelial cells that make
0:40:01 up the vessels and capillaries, and it has impacts on the neurons in our body that create
0:40:05 all sorts of changes in the way that blood flows, how fast it flows, and so on and so
0:40:06 forth.
0:40:08 Now here’s a key thing to understand.
0:40:12 Adrenaline, epinephrine, does not cross the blood brain barrier.
0:40:17 So the adrenaline from our adrenals doesn’t actually get into the brain to stimulate elevated
0:40:18 levels of alertness.
0:40:21 Rather, it acts on receptors on the vagus nerve.
0:40:25 Again, the vagus nerve communicates with the brain and also in the vagus nerve, certain
0:40:27 brain areas communicate with the body.
0:40:31 So adrenaline has a lot of effects within the body, but when it’s released, it also
0:40:35 acts on so-called adrenergic receptors on the vagus nerve.
0:40:40 Then the vagus nerve is activated in a way that stimulates the activity of a brain area
0:40:44 because remember, the vagus goes from the body into the brain, stimulates the so-called
0:40:49 NST, and because neuroanatomists like to argue about naming, sometimes it’ll also be called
0:40:56 the NTS, the Nucleus of the Solitary Tract or the Nucleus Tractus Solitaris, super annoying,
0:41:01 I know, forget the acronym, unless you want to know that it’s sometimes NST and sometimes
0:41:02 it’s NTS.
0:41:04 Don’t ask me why neuroanatomists do this.
0:41:08 In any case, the NST can then communicate with a really important brain area whose name
0:41:11 you should remember, which is the locus ceruleus.
0:41:16 The locus ceruleus contains neurons that release, among other things, nor epinephrine,
0:41:20 which is similar in action to epinephrine, but different.
0:41:24 Neurons in the locus ceruleus send those little wires that we call axons into the brain in
0:41:26 a very widespread manner.
0:41:29 It’s almost as if they’re positioned to sprinkler the brain with a neurochemical and
0:41:32 that neurochemical is nor epinephrine.
0:41:35 They also have the capacity to release other neurochemicals, but right now we’re concentrating
0:41:36 on nor epinephrine.
0:41:41 When nor epinephrine is released from the locus ceruleus, it has this tendency to elevate
0:41:46 the levels of activity in other brain areas through this sort of sprinkling-like mechanism.
0:41:51 What that means is that other areas of the brain, such as your prefrontal cortex, such
0:41:55 as your hippocampus, such as different areas of the hypothalamus and indeed lots of brain
0:41:59 circuits, all have a greater capacity to be engaged.
0:42:03 This is what we’re talking about when we talk about autonomic arousal.
0:42:06 Release of adrenaline from the adrenals that has action within the body, elevated heart
0:42:11 rate, blood pressure, et cetera, and then adrenaline also from the adrenals to the vagus,
0:42:16 from the vagus to the nst, nst to locus ceruleus, and then locus ceruleus, sprinklers the brain
0:42:21 with this nor epinephrine, raising the levels of baseline activity in all those brain areas
0:42:26 and making them more likely to be engaged by things that we’re trying to attend to.
0:42:31 More likely to engage, say, the neurons of the prefrontal cortex that can learn context-dependent
0:42:34 strategy switching, such as in a stoop task.
0:42:38 Or when we’re trying to attend to information and we go, “Okay, here’s something important.
0:42:42 I need to pay attention to this,” we’re able to do that because of that elevated level
0:42:43 of nor epinephrine.
0:42:44 It facilitates.
0:42:47 It’s permissive for elevating our levels of attention and focus.
0:42:51 It’s also permissive for our hippocampus to encode new memories and for a bunch of other
0:42:54 brain areas to do their thing, so to speak.
0:42:56 Knowing these mechanisms is actually worthwhile.
0:43:03 If you’ve ever heard that exercise can give you energy, this is the basis of that statement.
0:43:07 Many people, in fact, myself for many years thought, “Okay, I definitely have to sleep
0:43:09 well in order to have energy and focus.”
0:43:10 That’s absolutely true.
0:43:11 Still true.
0:43:12 We’ll always be true.
0:43:16 I should maybe have some caffeine, be hydrated, well-nourished, all this stuff in order to
0:43:18 have the energy to exercise.
0:43:24 But it’s also true that exercise gives us energy and this is how it gives us energy.
0:43:29 When we move our body, the adrenals release adrenaline and the adrenaline acts through
0:43:33 two different so-called parallel pathways within the body, but again, it doesn’t cross
0:43:37 the blood-brain barrier, so then there’s a series of what we call signaling relays or
0:43:41 circuit relays up to the locus ceruleus and then a sort of analog.
0:43:45 It’s different, but an analog to epinephrine nor epinephrine is released within the brain
0:43:50 and lo and behold, we have elevated levels of both bodily energy and brain energy and
0:43:55 focus that we can devote to that exercise, but also to the learning that comes after
0:43:59 that exercise, which explains pretty much everything that we’ve talked about up until
0:44:01 now during the course of this podcast.
0:44:05 So the next time you’re feeling a little tired and you don’t want to work out, remember,
0:44:08 exercise gives you energy through the pathways that I just described.
0:44:12 Now anytime I talk about the adrenals, people start talking about adrenal burnout.
0:44:15 They say, “Oh, you burn out your adrenals,” you know, there are these crazy theories
0:44:19 that you’ll hear out there, you know, coffee burns out your adrenals.
0:44:20 Not true.
0:44:23 You’ll hear that if you exercise too much, it might burn out your energy or your adrenals.
0:44:29 Look, you have enough capacity within your adrenals to survive relatively long famines,
0:44:35 to survive long bouts of challenge, stress of many, many different kinds, short challenges,
0:44:36 and so on.
0:44:38 You’re not going to burn out your adrenals.
0:44:42 There is something called adrenal insufficiency syndrome, which is a real syndrome.
0:44:45 There are diseases of the adrenals, but that’s not what we’re referring to here.
0:44:51 You have plenty of adrenaline in your adrenals that you can deploy through movement, through
0:44:55 exercise to get the elevation and arousal attention and so forth that we’ve been talking
0:44:56 about.
0:45:00 There’s a set of biological pathways that were just recently discovered that will allow
0:45:05 you to understand how to use movement in order to engage your adrenals, so that then those
0:45:10 adrenals can release adrenaline, impact your vagus, impact the organs of your body, the
0:45:15 locus seruleus, and elevate your levels of attention and focus.
0:45:19 And a lot of the core components of these pathways are highlighted in a paper that I
0:45:22 absolutely love, another paper I absolutely love.
0:45:26 This is from Peter Strick’s laboratory at University of Pittsburgh, which is entitled
0:45:31 “The Mind-Body Problem, Circuits that Link the Cerebral Cortex to the Adrenal Medulla.”
0:45:35 The Adrenal Medulla are those adrenals that I’ve been referring to in the body.
0:45:39 And the question that Peter Strick and colleagues asked was, “How is it that movement actually
0:45:42 gets the adrenals to release adrenaline?
0:45:43 What’s the signal?
0:45:44 Does it come from the muscles?
0:45:47 Does it come from the skeleton?”
0:45:51 It’s perfectly reasonable to assume that there are signals that come from the muscles and
0:45:56 from the skeleton that cause the adrenals to release adrenaline when we exercise.
0:45:59 But what Strick and colleagues did was actually super clever.
0:46:02 They took some new tools that had just become available.
0:46:07 These are tools that allow the tracing of neural circuits from organs in the body all
0:46:11 the way back up to the brain, or from one brain structure to another brain structure,
0:46:13 and then to yet another brain structure.
0:46:18 We don’t have time to go into all the technical details, but this is a technique that perhaps
0:46:19 I’ll talk about on a future podcast.
0:46:24 That’s one that my laboratory used for a number of years to trace other neural pathways.
0:46:29 What they discovered is that there are essentially three categories of brain areas, all of which
0:46:34 communicate with the adrenals and can cause them to release adrenaline to create this elevation
0:46:37 and arousal and attention.
0:46:40 Those three brain areas include areas of the brain that are involved in thinking, what
0:46:46 we call cognition, areas of the brain that are related to what are called effective states,
0:46:49 which is just kind of a more general category that includes emotions.
0:46:53 If you saw the Huberman Lab podcast episode that I did with Lisa Feldman Barrett, she
0:46:58 explains beautifully the distinction between effective states and emotions, but these are
0:47:03 brain areas that basically relate to what we are feeling, or how we’re perceiving our
0:47:06 environment and how we’re reacting to it, these sorts of things.
0:47:12 Then there’s a third category of brain areas that most robustly communicates with the adrenals.
0:47:17 These are a collection of brain areas that are all involved with movement of particular
0:47:19 areas of our body.
0:47:21 These areas are broadly referred to as the motor network.
0:47:26 These are areas of the so-called cerebral cortex, which are on the outer portion of the brain,
0:47:29 and they send these wires down the spinal cord.
0:47:33 There’s a little relay in the spinal cord called the IML.
0:47:37 If you’re interested in the anatomical details, I’ll put the link to this paper in the show
0:47:39 note captions.
0:47:44 In any case, these brain areas that are involved in motor movement send axons, those wires,
0:47:46 down to the spinal cord.
0:47:52 Then from the spinal cord, they send a relay out via what’s called the cholinergic pre-ganglionic
0:47:53 neurons.
0:47:57 Basically, what ends up happening is that acetylcholine, which is a neuromodulator, is released from
0:48:03 these neurons that originate in the spinal cord onto the adrenal medulla, and then the
0:48:07 adrenal medulla, the so-called adrenals, same thing, adrenal medulla, adrenals, releases
0:48:08 adrenaline.
0:48:12 That creates these effects in the body on the heart, the muscles, and other tissues.
0:48:17 Then, as described before, that adrenaline also acts on the vagus, the vagus up to the
0:48:21 NST, the locus ruleus, and we have this elevation and alertness.
0:48:27 This paper and papers that came subsequent to it really explain how it is that the movement
0:48:33 of our body, a.k.a. exercise, allows us to have this elevation in arousal and alertness.
0:48:34 It’s a loop.
0:48:36 The adrenals release adrenaline.
0:48:40 They do these things by these two parallel pathways I’ve been talking about, but your
0:48:46 decision to engage these motor areas, to move particular areas of your body, is what deploys
0:48:47 that adrenaline.
0:48:51 Now, you might be thinking, “Well, duh, okay, when I exercise, there’s adrenaline
0:48:55 release in order to exercise, I need to move my body, and these brain areas control the
0:48:58 movement of my body,” but it’s not a duh.
0:49:03 It’s actually very profound because it turns out that the specific brain areas that best
0:49:10 activate the adrenals are the brain areas that control the muscles closest to the midline,
0:49:14 the core musculature, and the brain areas that are involved in generating the sorts
0:49:19 of movements that we would call compound movements, at least in the context of resistance training,
0:49:23 or that are responsible for moving multiple joints at the same time.
0:49:29 What this means in the practical sense is if you are feeling sluggish, you want energy,
0:49:34 or you’re simply exercising both for bodily effects and for brain effects, you need the
0:49:36 deployment of adrenaline, of epinephrine.
0:49:39 You need the deployment of norepinephrine in the brain.
0:49:44 By the way, anytime you have a deployment of norepinephrine in the brain, almost always,
0:49:48 there’s a coordinated action of release of dopamine, which most people have heard of
0:49:49 by now.
0:49:53 Dopamine is involved in motivation as well as movement, et cetera.
0:49:58 The simple takeaway here is if you want to get the arousal that comes from exercise in
0:50:04 order to use that arousal to leverage it towards better cognition, brain health, et cetera,
0:50:08 the key thing is to make sure that you’re doing exercises that are compound exercises,
0:50:09 so that these would be the movements.
0:50:13 You can look these up, just say compound exercises, you can put that anywhere, and you’ll see
0:50:19 that that includes things like squats, deadlifts, bench presses, dips, pull-ups, rows, and
0:50:23 yes, of course, you want to train your whole body so that you have symmetry of a function
0:50:28 of strength, and you want to offset any injuries and things of that sort, or aesthetic reasons,
0:50:29 perhaps.
0:50:34 But the idea here is if you want energy from exercise, you want focus, you need the deployment
0:50:38 of the neurochemicals that we’ve been discussing, most notably epinephrine and norepinephrine,
0:50:42 and through the identification of this motor network as well as the effective and cognitive
0:50:49 networks that converge on this area of the spinal cord and then send communication to
0:50:55 the adrenal medulla, you can essentially control the levels of arousal that your body and brain
0:50:57 produces.
0:51:01 So in describing this, my hope is that you’ll no longer think about exercise as just elevating
0:51:05 your heart rate, or you no longer think about exercise just as moving your body, but rather
0:51:10 that the movement of your body is creating specific neurochemical outcomes, both in the
0:51:15 body and the brain, that create the arousal, that initiates the improvements in focus and
0:51:19 attention that allow you to learn better, and that contribute generally to brain health
0:51:20 and longevity.
0:51:25 And of course, you aficionados out there will remind me, I’m sure, but I’m going to beat
0:51:30 you to the punch here, yes, your hypothalamus is also talking to your pituitary, which releases
0:51:36 certain chemicals into your bloodstream, which also go to your adrenals to cause your adrenals
0:51:39 to deploy both adrenaline, epinephrine, as well as cortisol.
0:51:44 That pathway is still intact, okay, but that’s a slightly slower pathway.
0:51:47 Here I’m focusing on the neural pathways, some of which have only recently been discovered
0:51:53 in the last five or 10 years, that work very, very fast to generate the sorts of arousal
0:51:59 that are relevant to brain function and brain longevity, okay, nothing has changed in terms
0:52:02 of the old story about how the brain impacts the adrenals, that’s all still there.
0:52:05 But here we’re into the modern stuff.
0:52:10 And by the way, for those of you that are interested in things like psychosomatic disorders, trauma
0:52:14 and how trauma can quote unquote be stored in the body and it’s not so much stored in
0:52:20 the body, but how it can impact the body and then how the body itself can impact the brain.
0:52:25 This paper has also been used as support for the idea that indeed those effective areas,
0:52:29 those emotional areas, those cognitive areas have a route by which they can communicate
0:52:34 with the adrenal medulla to cause the release of adrenaline when we have specific thoughts.
0:52:37 It was always known that if we have specific thoughts, it can quote unquote stress us out,
0:52:39 our heart rate can go up, et cetera.
0:52:44 This paper also provides a reasonable anatomical substrate for that phenomenon.
0:52:48 You know, I never want to make too much of any one single paper or finding, but I will
0:52:52 say that after I read that paper from stricken colleagues and through some of the subsequent
0:52:56 discussions about that paper that I overheard at meetings and so forth, it really made me
0:53:01 think differently about exercise and now anytime that I’m feeling tired, provided that I’m
0:53:06 not chronically sleep deprived or something of that sort, I remind myself that if I start
0:53:10 moving my body, in particular if I engage core muscles, that was one of the key findings
0:53:15 in that paper that the areas of the brain that control the core muscles as well as do
0:53:17 compound movements, I move multiple joints.
0:53:22 I start warming up in a way that includes some, maybe even just air squats or some running
0:53:26 in place or jumping jacks, things of that sort, that the increase in energy that I’m
0:53:28 perceiving is real.
0:53:33 It’s based on the same neurochemical outputs that would occur had I gone into the gym or
0:53:37 to the run or whatever workout with tons of energy, it would just have increased the level
0:53:39 of adrenaline further.
0:53:43 So this idea that we can actually control our body with our mind and to some extent,
0:53:46 our mind with our body, that’s absolutely true.
0:53:51 And this is one of the tools that I find particularly useful anytime I want to overcome that wall
0:53:57 of resistance to not doing the physical exercise that I know I and basically all of us should
0:53:58 be doing.
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0:55:48 Okay, so let’s think just a little bit more about how the body communicates with the brain
0:55:54 during exercise, both in order to understand the mechanisms by which exercise improves
0:55:59 brain health and function, but also ways that we can leverage that to improve brain health
0:56:02 and function by using exercise.
0:56:06 One of the more interesting and powerful and indeed surprising ways that the body communicates
0:56:10 with the brain during exercise to improve brain health and indeed our ability to remember
0:56:17 things and to learn is the way that our bones, our skeleton, when they’re under loads, when
0:56:21 they experience mechanical stress, not severe mechanical stress that would break them, but
0:56:28 mechanical stress, they release hormones, in particular, something called osteocalcin.
0:56:31 You might be thinking, wait, the bones release hormones?
0:56:35 Yes, your bones release hormones, one of which is called osteocalcin.
0:56:39 Osteocalcin is an incredible molecule, animal studies that were done mainly at Columbia
0:56:45 School of Medicine, but later also at Columbia and elsewhere in humans have shown that osteocalcin
0:56:50 is released from the bones during exercise, both in mice and in humans, travels to the
0:56:54 brain so it can cross the blood-brain barrier, and there it can encourage the growth of neurons
0:56:59 and their connections within the hippocampus, an area of the brain that’s vitally important
0:57:03 for the encoding of new memories, and there are some data, not a ton, but there’s some
0:57:10 data which suggests that perhaps, I want to highlight underscore and boldface, perhaps,
0:57:14 can increase the number of neurons in the so-called dentate gyrus of the hippocampus
0:57:17 to allow even better capacity for memory.
0:57:21 Now osteocalcin is therefore a really interesting molecule, right, comes from bones, travels
0:57:25 to the brain, improves functioning of the hippocampus, which is important for learning
0:57:31 and memory, that’s amazing, and it does so, in part, through the actions of something
0:57:36 that most of you perhaps have heard of which is called BDNF, or brain-derived-neutrophic
0:57:37 factor.
0:57:42 Now, it’s very important for us to understand that any time we hear about exercise increases
0:57:46 a growth factor, and by the way, exercise increases brain-derived-neutrophic factor,
0:57:50 it increases growth factors that cause the growth of endothelial cells, so blood vessels,
0:57:54 we’ll talk more about that in a moment, and it increases nerve growth factor, it’s not
0:57:59 just BDNF, there are lots of different growth factors, a few of which NGF and BDNF act on
0:58:06 neurons, and other growth factors that act on endothelial cells, vasculature, it seems
0:58:11 that a lot of the effects of BDNF on the brain that are caused by doing exercise and
0:58:15 that benefit us in terms of short and long-term memory, our ability to encode new things and
0:58:20 remember them for long periods of time, to resist age-related degeneration, because that’s
0:58:26 the case indeed, that our hippocampus decreases in volume over time as we age, just naturally,
0:58:32 even in somebody that doesn’t have Alzheimer’s dementia, and exercise can adjust the slope
0:58:38 of that decline significantly, provided there’s enough exercise in the appropriate exercise.
0:58:44 I don’t think all, but many of the effects of BDNF appear to be mediated by osteocalcin.
0:58:49 What this means is that any exercise program that’s designed not just to benefit our body,
0:58:55 but also our brain health and performance, should do something to load the skeleton in
0:58:59 some sort of impactful way that causes the release of osteocalcin.
0:59:05 Now, unfortunately, there has not been a systematic exploration of the specific types of exercise
0:59:10 that best cause the release of osteocalcin in humans.
0:59:14 But based on what we understand about how osteocalcin is made and released, it seems
0:59:21 reasonable to assume and reasonable to employ some exercise within your weekly exercise that
0:59:26 involves jumping of some sort, in particular, jumping where you have to control the eccentric
0:59:28 or landing portion of that jump.
0:59:31 Now, I’m certainly not the first to talk about this.
0:59:33 It’s been discussed in a different context.
0:59:38 That is, jumping and landing has been discussed in a different context, namely by Peter Atia
0:59:43 and others who have talked about the fact that as people age, one of the primary causes
0:59:51 of mortality are the infections and the lack of mobility caused by falls that people generally
0:59:55 have when they’re going downstairs or stepping down as a common source of falls.
0:59:58 Falls are a common source of breaking things.
1:00:02 Breaking things is a common source of inactivity, and inactivity is a common source of infections
1:00:06 and other things that lead to earlier mortality.
1:00:12 What this means for all of us, young, middle-aged, and old, is that we should include some form
1:00:13 of jumping in our weekly exercise.
1:00:17 Now, you could imagine doing that within your high-intensity interval training, provided
1:00:22 you can do it safely and not get injured, but this is also a call for all of us to think
1:00:25 about including, say, some jumping rope.
1:00:29 If you’re going to jump rope, maybe not just jumping a centimeter off the ground to be
1:00:33 able to just consistently skip, skip, skip, skip along, but maybe doing some high knees,
1:00:38 maybe doing some double unders if you can do those, perhaps doing some box jumps.
1:00:41 Jumping off boxes at different heights, again, what you can do safely without getting injured,
1:00:46 no doubt is going to provide load to the skeleton, I guess, unless you’re doing it underwater
1:00:51 in outer space, it’s hard to imagine how it wouldn’t, and that seems to me like the most
1:00:55 direct way to employ this osteocalcin pathway.
1:01:01 This pathway from the bones to the brain and neurogenesis in the hippocampus, I do believe,
1:01:07 is likely to underlie a lot of the enhancement of learning and memory that’s seen in terms
1:01:13 of the chronic effects of exercise on brain health and brain function over time.
1:01:19 It is not just the things that exercise does via arousal in the minutes and hours after
1:01:25 exercise, but the way that exercise can improve literally the size and structure of one of
1:01:28 the most critical structures in our brain that’s responsible for learning and memory,
1:01:29 the hippocampus.
1:01:33 Of course, there are a lot of other ways that the body communicates with the brain.
1:01:36 We definitely don’t have time to go through all of them, but it’s worth thinking about
1:01:41 a few of them logically just in terms of listing them off and thinking about how they might
1:01:44 communicate with the brain to improve brain health and longevity.
1:01:49 When you exercise, you utilize fuel differently, depending on whether or not you’re relying
1:01:52 on glycogen or fatty acids, and of course, it’s going to depend on how long you’ve been
1:01:57 exercising and the type of exercise and what you’re using for fuel, literally the foods
1:01:58 you eat, et cetera.
1:02:02 We don’t have time to go into all of that, but get this, it turns out that there are
1:02:09 liver-to-brain neural pathways, so your liver can communicate with neurons and other cells
1:02:14 in your brain, including the glial cells, the cells that are important for regulating
1:02:16 energy metabolism and a bunch of other things, too.
1:02:22 Your liver can communicate to your brain both through neural pathways and by releasing things
1:02:26 into your bloodstream that then communicate to your brain, “Oh, the body is using a different
1:02:27 source of fuel.
1:02:30 It’s been using different sources or combinations of fuels for the last 20 minutes.
1:02:35 Maybe you should adjust your brain state in order to be able to cope with that or in response
1:02:36 to that.”
1:02:41 Of course, there are other organs in the body that are communicating with the brain also.
1:02:45 Your diaphragm, for instance, is communicating with your brain through indirect pathways
1:02:48 about how you’re breathing during exercise, and of course, your brain is controlling your
1:02:54 diaphragm, too, via a number of stations, including the pathway that includes the phrenic nerve,
1:02:57 which controls the diaphragm.
1:03:01 The point here is that once you start exercising, of course, it has an impact on the organs
1:03:02 in your body.
1:03:06 They change the way that they’re functioning, your heart, your liver, your adrenals, your
1:03:12 skeleton, literally your bones, and of course, your muscles, and they’re releasing things
1:03:16 that impact brain function either directly or indirectly.
1:03:20 Once you start thinking about exercise in that context, even if we don’t parse each
1:03:25 and every one of those pathways individually, you can start thinking about exercise as a
1:03:31 multifactorial way of enhancing and changing brain activity so that it positions it to
1:03:36 learn better in the subsequent hours and days, as well as modifying areas of the brain, like
1:03:42 the hippocampus, by making certain brain areas literally bigger, more powerful at engaging
1:03:46 the sorts of things that they do in the case of the hippocampus, learning in the case of
1:03:51 the prefrontal cortex, context-dependent decision-making, updating strategies, these sorts of things,
1:03:56 and generally speaking, exercise causes the release of things like BDNF, brain-derived
1:04:01 neurotrophic factor, and nerve growth factor that enhance the health and stability of existing
1:04:07 neuron connections, and something that is very rarely, if ever, discussed publicly, not
1:04:11 because it’s some sort of secret that people want to keep, but I just don’t hear it discussed,
1:04:16 is that BDNF is an activity-dependent molecule.
1:04:21 It’s a molecule that can serve to stabilize and enhance the growth of neurons, keep their
1:04:27 connections in place, grow new connections, and it does so when neurons are active.
1:04:31 So the point is that BDNF has to be released in order for that to happen, but the release
1:04:38 of BDNF itself is activity-dependent, and it acts best on neurons that are already active.
1:04:42 So if ever there was a mechanism that could explain why it is that people that exercise
1:04:47 regularly seem to maintain healthier brains into later life, it’s that one.
1:04:49 It’s that BDNF is activity-dependent.
1:04:53 When I say activity-dependent, I mean the electrical activity of neurons is what causes the release
1:05:01 of BDNF, and then once BDNF is released, it has the best opportunity to stabilize and
1:05:06 enhance the growth of existing neurons if those other neurons are already active.
1:05:11 Now if we were to list off all the different pathways and mechanisms by which exercise
1:05:16 improves brain health and performance, it would be a list of probably, I don’t know,
1:05:23 somewhere between 40 and 100 different molecular pathways and probably, I don’t know, somewhere
1:05:26 between 12 and 20 different anatomical pathways.
1:05:28 And we certainly don’t have time for all that.
1:05:29 I don’t think that’s what you’re interested in.
1:05:32 I’ve tried to just highlight some of the key ones today.
1:05:38 One additional one that I’d like to highlight is the lactate pathway or the impact of lactate
1:05:39 when we exercise.
1:05:43 This is getting discussed more and more these days on podcasts and elsewhere.
1:05:48 One interesting finding, for instance, is that lactate is what’s produced when we exercise
1:05:49 intensely.
1:05:54 Our muscles produce lactate, and lactate is a very powerful appetite suppressant.
1:05:58 Some of you may be saying, “Well, when I exercise hard, I get really, really hungry.”
1:06:03 Well, that may be true, but it’s also true that if you exercise really, really hard and
1:06:08 then you hydrate well and you wait a little while, oftentimes that hunger will subside.
1:06:12 I’m not saying that you should starve yourself after exercise, fuel as needed for you.
1:06:14 If you’re an intermittent faster, do that thing.
1:06:16 If you like to eat right after your exercise, do that.
1:06:21 Do what’s best for you, but understand that lactate has powerful effects on our appetite
1:06:23 because why?
1:06:27 Because lactate has powerful effects not just on our body, but on our brain.
1:06:32 And it is able to impact the activity of neurons in our so-called hypothalamus, a little marble
1:06:37 sized region above the roof of our mouth, that contains some of the neurons that control
1:06:40 our appetite and our degree of satiety.
1:06:43 So the point here is that lactate is a molecule produced in the body that can actually signal
1:06:44 to the brain.
1:06:49 Most of you perhaps have heard that lactate can be used as a fuel for neurons.
1:06:55 During exercise, lactate is the preferred fuel for neurons under most circumstances, especially
1:07:00 under circumstances of intense exercise that spares glucose for other things, including
1:07:02 for cognitive work later on.
1:07:07 This is perhaps one of the reasons why when people do intense exercise, provided it’s
1:07:12 not too long and too intense, and then you go to learn something, you have enhanced focus.
1:07:15 It’s because of the arousal we’ve been talking about all along today.
1:07:20 But it’s also because we believe that there’s glucose, there’s fuel that’s been spared that
1:07:24 then can be used by the neurons because during the exercise, you weren’t using quite as much
1:07:26 glucose, you were using lactate.
1:07:31 Now lactate is also a stimulus for something called the blood brain barrier, which is made
1:07:36 up of endothelial cells, specialized endothelial cells that act as a barrier so that certain
1:07:41 things, in particular large molecules, can’t cross from the body into the brain.
1:07:46 Lactate stimulates the release of something called VEGF, which is basically an endothelial
1:07:50 growth factor that promotes the stability and growth of the blood brain barrier.
1:07:55 This is very important in the context of brain health and longevity, and longevity in particular,
1:08:00 because one of the major features of age-related cognitive decline and one that’s greatly
1:08:04 exacerbated in Alzheimer’s is a breakdown of the blood brain barrier.
1:08:08 So the integrity, the structure and function of the blood brain barrier is something that’s
1:08:11 very important and related to brain health.
1:08:18 An exercise that’s intense enough to produce lactate causes the increase in VEGF that acts
1:08:23 on and within the endothelial cells to improve the integrity of the blood brain barrier.
1:08:26 And because I mentioned the astrocytes earlier and because I did my postdoc with somebody
1:08:32 that was sort of famous for popularizing the study of astrocytes, when no one else wanted
1:08:34 to study the astrocytes, now everybody studies the astrocytes.
1:08:39 But I have to mention something about astrocytes, which, no, they’re not just a support cell.
1:08:43 Certain types of cells in the brain are called glia, the glia come in multiple forms, oligodendrocytes
1:08:48 in the periphery, they’re called Schwann cells, but then you also have astrocytes, and astrocytes
1:08:52 sit around the synapse, they ensheath synapses, remember synapses are the communication points
1:08:57 between neurons, and the astrocytes are beautifully positioned to read out the amount of activity
1:09:01 that’s occurring between neurons and produce fuel for those neurons.
1:09:06 Now the astrocytes mainly use glucose for fuel, but they can produce lactate.
1:09:10 So again, we have this activity dependent phenomenon, that is when certain neurons are
1:09:14 very, very active, the astrocytes are able to produce more lactate, the neurons can
1:09:19 use lactate, spares glucose, and a bunch of great things happen, when I say great things
1:09:23 happen, I mean in the context of the ways that exercise can improve brain function.
1:09:28 Because those elevated levels of lactate in turn also increase BDNF, we already talked
1:09:32 about the blood-brain barrier, basically the muscles producing lactate is terrific,
1:09:38 but the astrocytes producing lactate for the neurons to feed on is also terrific because
1:09:43 lactate can be used as a fuel, and it triggers all these downstream or subsequent mechanisms
1:09:44 including BDNF.
1:09:49 So basically what we’re talking about is the lots and lots of ways that exercise improves
1:09:55 brain health in the long term, BDNF, brain plasticity, stability of synapses, and so forth,
1:10:00 maybe even new neurons, maybe, not a lot of evidence for that in humans yet frankly,
1:10:01 but maybe.
1:10:07 And exercise can improve brain function in the short term through mechanisms of arousal,
1:10:13 but also through alternate fuel usage, such as lactate from the body and from cells within
1:10:18 the brain that we call the astrocytes, and the release of all sorts of other things,
1:10:22 IGF1 to promote more vasculature, and on, and on, and on.
1:10:27 It’s really quite beautiful, the sort of wave front of molecules and neural pathways that’s
1:10:32 initiated when we exercise, provided we exercise intensely enough.
1:10:36 So this is a, you know, double and triple call for including at least some high intensity
1:10:41 interval training, VO2 max type training each week, as well as doing resistance training.
1:10:47 And of course, the long duration cardiovascular training, the sort of, you know, 30 or 45
1:10:51 or 60 minute or maybe even two hour zone 2 type stuff, you can look up zone 2, but it’s
1:10:55 basically a level of cardiovascular training that still allows you to talk, but where you
1:11:00 to go any more intensely, you wouldn’t be able to complete sentences.
1:11:04 That zone 2 training, of course, is going to be very powerful for the health and integrity
1:11:10 of the cardiovascular system that’s going to allow for the delivery of all these molecules.
1:11:13 And of course, the delivery of blood flow itself to the brain because cerebral blood
1:11:16 flow is central to brain function.
1:11:17 Okay.
1:11:20 So if you’re right at the threshold of about to be overwhelmed by the number of different
1:11:26 mechanisms by which exercise improves brain function and health, we’re not going to add
1:11:28 any more mechanisms.
1:11:32 We are, however, going to talk about the practical steps that you can take to make sure that
1:11:38 you’re getting the most brain benefits from your exercise based on what we’ve talked about
1:11:43 so far, as well as a broad survey of the literature.
1:11:45 And again, it is a big literature.
1:11:50 Here are the four things that I believe everyone should be doing every single week in terms
1:11:52 of their exercise program.
1:11:55 Now, we’ve talked a lot about exercise on this podcast before.
1:12:00 I can summarize the very, very top contour of what my takeaway is from the literature
1:12:06 and from discussions with experts such as Dr. Andy Galpin and others, which is, I believe
1:12:11 that everybody should include both resistance training, could be body weight, free weights,
1:12:16 machines, some combination of those, as well as cardiovascular training each week, and
1:12:20 that the cardiovascular training should include both high intensity interval training, at
1:12:24 least once per week, and some so-called long slow distance training or zone two type training
1:12:25 each week.
1:12:28 So presumably, most of you are doing some form of that.
1:12:30 So maybe you’re doing more cardio than resistance training.
1:12:33 Maybe you’re doing more resistance training than cardio.
1:12:39 If you’re interested in a zero cost program where you can start to sculpt out a idealized
1:12:43 program for you, but you want to start with a kind of general template, we have a newsletter
1:12:47 that you can access at ubermanlab.com, zero cost, you don’t even have to sign up to access
1:12:51 it, although, if you want to sign up for the newsletter, that could be valuable to you too.
1:12:53 Completely zero cost.
1:12:57 You can go to ubermanlab.com, go to newsletter, scroll down to foundational fitness protocol.
1:13:02 It describes the program that I’ve been following essentially for 30 plus years, and again, it’s
1:13:07 about three cardiovascular training sessions per week, three resistance training sessions
1:13:08 per week.
1:13:13 The cardiovascular training ranges in time from about 12 minutes and then a longer 60
1:13:15 minute session.
1:13:23 The resistance training is generally 45 to 75 minutes, so on average about an hour.
1:13:27 And it might sound like a lot, but when you look at that foundational fitness protocol,
1:13:30 what you realize is that some of the workouts are really, really short.
1:13:33 Some of them are a little bit longer, none of them are longer than an hour.
1:13:39 So it’s pretty reasonable to do, and I certainly did it while working, well, to be frank, extremely
1:13:43 long hours for many, many years, so provided your sleep is intact and other areas of your
1:13:47 life are dialed in with stress, et cetera, should be doable for most everybody.
1:13:51 But modify it according to what you need, or if you’re doing something completely different,
1:13:52 more power to you.
1:13:55 I just want you to know that’s available as a zero cost resource if you want to check
1:13:57 it out.
1:14:03 With all of that said, whatever exercise you happen to be doing or you happen to be planning,
1:14:09 I do believe it should include four things specifically to improve brain health and performance,
1:14:12 although these four things will also benefit you at the level of your bodily health, no
1:14:13 doubt.
1:14:20 The first thing is to include at least one workout per week that is of a long, slow distance
1:14:21 nature.
1:14:26 So zone two type cardio, maybe you get a little bit up into zone three, but basically jogging,
1:14:34 swimming, rowing, any activity that you can carry out consistently for 45 to 75 minutes
1:14:35 without getting injured.
1:14:37 People always say, well, do I have to run?
1:14:40 No, if you don’t like running and running too hard on your body or you’ll get injured,
1:14:41 then do something else.
1:14:45 Maybe you do the row or maybe you ride a stationary bike, maybe you ride a road bike.
1:14:49 For me, it’s jogging generally or hiking with a weight vest, those are the things that
1:14:51 I enjoy and that I can do without getting injured.
1:14:54 But for other people, it’s a different exercise.
1:14:59 But at least one long, slow distance training session per week is going to be very beneficial
1:15:03 for brain health because of the way that it impacts cerebral blood flow and ethereal health
1:15:08 and basically the way that cardiovascular health improves brain function at the level
1:15:11 of blood flow, field delivery, et cetera.
1:15:16 The second thing is to include at least one workout per week that’s of the so-called high
1:15:19 intensity interval training type.
1:15:22 Now there are a lot of different types of high intensity interval training out there.
1:15:28 In fact, Dr. Andy Galpin says, you know, we’ll hear about say like the four by four by four
1:15:30 protocol, right?
1:15:35 Four minutes of going as hard as you can for four minutes basically where there’s no variation
1:15:38 in the intensity through that whole four minutes, you’re going hard the whole four minutes but
1:15:42 only as hard as you can for the entire four minutes, then resting four minutes, and then
1:15:47 repeating that four by four cycle four times, okay, so that’s one way to do it.
1:15:50 But Dr. Andy Galpin would be the first to tell you that probably also get great results
1:15:58 from a three by three by four type of workout or a six by six by six type of workout.
1:16:02 So for many people that’s going to be too much and too intense, or if you’re me and
1:16:06 you prefer a high intensity interval training session that is more like a two minutes on
1:16:10 as hard as you can go for two minutes and then rest for say three to four minutes and
1:16:15 then repeat maybe four times, maybe five times, well then do that.
1:16:19 I have a high intensity interval training session that I do when I’m very limited on
1:16:23 time, which involves getting on the airdine bike, they sometimes call the assault bike,
1:16:26 there’s a lot of resistance, has that fan which I always thought was to cool me off.
1:16:33 But then once I actually got on one and started riding I realized that that’s to provide resistance.
1:16:37 But basically if I’m limited on time, I’ll hop on there, I’ll pedal for about a minute
1:16:41 or two, just kind of warm up and then I’ll go all out for a minute, rest for 30 seconds,
1:16:44 all out for a minute, rest for 30 seconds.
1:16:48 The first three or four of those cycles, feeling pretty good, by the seventh and eighth one
1:16:51 I’m praying.
1:16:55 And generally when one finishes that type of workout, your heart rate is very, very
1:16:56 elevated.
1:17:00 Now I don’t tend to track my heart rate during exercise, perhaps I should, but I don’t like
1:17:05 to get too weighed down with technology when I exercise, I like to go more on feel, that’s
1:17:07 just me.
1:17:15 I find that my heart rate is extremely high right as I get off that thing, but five minutes
1:17:17 later it’s back to baseline.
1:17:21 And I certainly feel energized after doing that to go do some cognitive work, to shower
1:17:22 up and to head to work, that sort of thing.
1:17:26 So pick a high-intensity interval training session that you can do at least once per
1:17:28 week, and that works for you.
1:17:32 And again, it’s really important to pick a form of exercise for the high-intensity interval
1:17:35 training that you can do without getting injured.
1:17:37 This is so important.
1:17:40 One way to really limit your brain health and bodily health is to get injured and to
1:17:42 not be able to exercise.
1:17:45 In a few minutes I’ll tell you about what happens when you don’t exercise for a certain
1:17:49 duration and how that negatively impacts your brain health.
1:17:52 And it’s not that long before that starts to happen.
1:17:59 But in the meantime, the first was long slow distance, or so-called zone two, so we could
1:18:03 call that LSD, not the psychedelic, but long slow distance exercise.
1:18:08 Second was high-intensity interval training, or HIIT, or HIIT.
1:18:11 The third would be TUT, TUT, time under tension.
1:18:14 If you’re doing resistance training, and I do believe everybody should be doing resistance
1:18:18 training, there are a near infinite number of different ways to do resistance training
1:18:20 as you well know.
1:18:21 You can move the weight ballistically.
1:18:23 You can control the eccentric.
1:18:25 You can do any number of different things.
1:18:28 But some proportion of the exercises that you do during your resistance training during
1:18:33 the week should include time under tension training, where you’re really emphasizing
1:18:38 the contraction of the muscles, the slow lowering of the weight, as well as the lifting of the
1:18:40 weight, contracting the muscles as hard as you can.
1:18:44 And this is really to emphasize the nerve to muscle pathways and the way that time under
1:18:50 tension promotes the release of things from muscles into the bloodstream that can positively
1:18:56 impact the brain, as well as the way that focusing your brain on exercises such that
1:19:00 you’re isolating muscles, or even if you’re not doing a so-called isolation exercise,
1:19:05 maybe you’re doing a compound exercise like a dip, or a squat, or a deadlift, but that
1:19:09 really concentrating on the muscles that are supposed to be managing the work and not just
1:19:11 moving the weight, but challenging the muscles.
1:19:14 This is a very important thing, challenging the muscles using the weight, not lifting
1:19:16 weights or moving weights.
1:19:21 By focusing on time under tension, you will, of course, get benefits as it relates to hypertrophy
1:19:25 and strength increases, in particular, hypertrophy.
1:19:31 Doing time under tension requires you to engage what we call the upper motor neuron to lower
1:19:32 motor neuron.
1:19:33 You have motor neurons in your cortex.
1:19:36 You also have motor neurons in your spinal cord.
1:19:40 Those pathways that then go out to the muscles and control the muscles in very deliberate
1:19:45 ways, and time under tension training is very beneficial for the deployment of the molecules
1:19:50 that work both within the body, but also within the brain to support brain health and function,
1:19:54 both in the short term and most particularly in the long term.
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1:21:42 Okay, so we have long slow distance, high intensity interval training, and some degree
1:21:46 of time under tension training with resistance training.
1:21:48 You might be asking how many sets?
1:21:49 What proportion?
1:21:50 That depends on your goals.
1:21:54 If you’re a power lifter and you’re trying to lift bigger weights or you simply want
1:21:58 to get stronger, you’re not going to devote a lot of your training to time under tension
1:21:59 most likely.
1:22:02 You’re focusing mostly on the performance of those lifts to move more weight.
1:22:06 But in my case, what I do just for sake of example, again, this is just what I happen
1:22:13 to do is I tend to make a full third of my resistance training just focused on time under
1:22:14 tension.
1:22:17 So if I do two exercises, typically the first exercise is a compound exercise.
1:22:20 So if it’s a shoulder press, for instance, I’ll do a couple of warm-up sets and then
1:22:21 the work sets.
1:22:26 I try and move the weight and generally I tend to work pretty heavy and for me, heavy
1:22:29 for me in the four to eight repetition range, I’ll try and move the weight as quickly as
1:22:35 I can on the concentric phase, the lifting phase, and then at least twice as slow on
1:22:36 the lowering phase.
1:22:38 And then I pause while keeping the muscles under tension.
1:22:44 I never really set the weight down at all during a set if I’m doing my job, that is.
1:22:49 And then the second exercise that I do, I really focus even more on time under tension.
1:22:53 So whether or not it’s a compound exercise or an isolation exercise, again, compound exercise,
1:22:58 multiple joints moving, isolation exercise, single joints moving, I’ll really concentrate
1:23:00 on keeping the muscle under tension the entire time.
1:23:05 In fact, I’ll lift the weight off the stack if it’s a machine or if it’s a free weight
1:23:10 just a little bit, engage the muscles that I’m trying to activate or train, and then
1:23:17 keep it under tension throughout the concentric, the contraction, and the lowering of that weight
1:23:22 and then never actually set it down until the end of the set, a.k.a. increasing the time
1:23:23 under tension.
1:23:27 And then the fourth category of exercise that I believe everybody should include in their
1:23:36 existing workouts or add if you’re not currently working out is some sort of explosive jumping
1:23:38 and or eccentric landing.
1:23:42 Now the explosive jumping with eccentric landing you could do on a mat, right?
1:23:45 Most people won’t do it on concrete because they’re worried about impact, that sort of
1:23:46 thing.
1:23:51 But let’s say you have some mats or you’re on a lawn or you’re on dirt or you’re jumping
1:23:55 up onto a box as high as you can and then jumping down and controlling the eccentric portion.
1:23:59 Again, pick something that you can do safely, progress slowly, right?
1:24:02 If you’re going to jump up and off boxes, you want to start with low boxes.
1:24:08 I know that many of you can jump quite high and I’m not one of those people, but if you
1:24:11 can jump quite high and then you’re going to jump off that box and you’re going to do
1:24:16 this as a new thing, you’ll notice that anytime you add eccentric training to your workout
1:24:18 regimen, it tends to increase soreness a lot.
1:24:22 And often people get injured by including a new form of movement, in particular form
1:24:29 of movement that you can fall and or not just falling, but by including a lot of eccentric
1:24:31 movements that they hadn’t been doing previously.
1:24:36 Again, be really safe about this, but that loading of the skeleton through eccentric movement
1:24:41 and controlling the descent, super important, not just for your body, not just to avoid
1:24:46 falls, not just to improve coordination and a bunch of other great things, but also to
1:24:51 get that release of osteocalcin, the improvements in BDNF, brain performance, brain health,
1:24:52 and so on.
1:24:56 And I’m guessing that most of you can probably incorporate these four things, long, slow
1:24:59 distance, high intensity interval training, some deliberate time under tension training
1:25:02 during your resistance training, again, could be done with body weight, doesn’t have to
1:25:07 even be done with machines or free weights, as well as some explosive and eccentric control
1:25:13 training without adding any time to your existing workout regimen simply by incorporating it
1:25:16 into whatever workouts you happen to already be doing.
1:25:21 And the explosive eccentric control training could be done, frankly, at the end of a run,
1:25:26 you could do it at the end of your zone two day, you could do it on the end of a hit day.
1:25:29 Whenever you do it and however you do it, just try not to get injured.
1:25:30 That’s the most important thing.
1:25:31 Why?
1:25:34 Well, it turns out if you get injured, you can’t exercise.
1:25:38 Sometimes you can, and it’s good to continue exercising provided you’re not aggravating
1:25:40 that injury, but a lot of times you can’t.
1:25:45 And there are actually studies of how quickly your brain starts to suffer if you don’t exercise.
1:25:51 Now, most of these studies have been done on very experienced athletes or people that
1:25:55 are exercising a lot and then are forced to detrain or stop training completely.
1:25:58 And in some of these studies, they’ve done this independent of anything else.
1:26:02 It’s not like these people got sick from a, you know, a cold or flew and then had to stop
1:26:03 training.
1:26:05 They’ll just have them train a lot and then stop training and then start to look at some
1:26:08 of the effects that occur within the brain.
1:26:12 And the major thing that I was able to extract from that literature is that after about 10
1:26:17 days of not doing any training, that is no cardiovascular training, no resistance training,
1:26:22 you start to see significant decrements in brain oxygenation levels as well as some other
1:26:26 markers that are indicative of brain health or that would be indicative of brain health
1:26:28 if they were to continue.
1:26:32 So if you haven’t been training at all for a long period of time, your brain is suffering.
1:26:37 The good news is you can start benefiting your brain very quickly by exercising.
1:26:41 Look out the foundational fitness protocol and involves a ramp up or warm in kind of
1:26:44 phase because you don’t want to jump into something whole hog if you haven’t been doing
1:26:45 it at all.
1:26:49 If you haven’t been exercising at all, you know, forget what you did in high school.
1:26:53 By the way, folks, anytime people tell you back in the day I was so fit, that’s not the
1:26:54 way to think about it.
1:26:57 It’s about today and what you’re going to do today and forward.
1:26:58 Okay.
1:26:59 The past is great.
1:27:02 It tells you you had a capacity, but you really just want to take where you are now and try
1:27:05 and improve where you are now going forward.
1:27:06 Okay.
1:27:07 The past is the past.
1:27:11 So how fit you were in high school or in junior high school or when you were in the kindergarten
1:27:14 class, you were the first one to make it around to get the blocks and the cookie in the milk
1:27:16 first, like awesome.
1:27:20 But if you’re going to start up having not exercised in a long, long time, think about
1:27:24 what you can do now so you don’t get injured because when you get injured, you can’t exercise
1:27:28 and when you don’t exercise for 10 days or more, that’s when you start to see decrements
1:27:30 in brain health.
1:27:33 So if you’re not exercising now, it’s a great time to get to it.
1:27:37 If you are exercising now and you have to take a week off because of some sort of illness
1:27:42 or injury or family event or stress, look, don’t obsess over that.
1:27:45 Don’t miss out on some of the key things of life or make yourself sick or by exercising
1:27:46 it.
1:27:47 Please, please, please don’t come to the gym sick.
1:27:48 Okay.
1:27:52 I did a whole episode on colds and flus and anytime people are coughing and sneezing and
1:27:56 they tell you they’re not contagious, that’s completely unsubstantiated by the scientific
1:27:57 data.
1:27:58 Please don’t come to the gym sick.
1:27:59 So if you had to take a week off, you’ll be fine.
1:28:00 You’ll be fine.
1:28:03 You’ll probably come back stronger in the end.
1:28:06 Take a couple of days and ramp back up, but after about 10 days, your brain health starts
1:28:07 to suffer.
1:28:09 So that’s an important number to keep in mind.
1:28:10 Okay.
1:28:14 So multiple times throughout today’s discussion, we’ve been talking about how exercise increases
1:28:17 arousal, arousal improves brain function.
1:28:18 That’s true.
1:28:19 You know what’s also true?
1:28:24 What’s also true is that exercise improves brain health in the long term, yes, through
1:28:28 the deployment of things like BDNF, yes, through the deployment of things like osteocalcin
1:28:30 and on and on.
1:28:34 But it also does so by improving your sleep.
1:28:39 There are now many, many studies showing that sleep is the thing that mediates many, not
1:28:46 all, but many of the positive effects of exercise on brain performance and long-term brain health.
1:28:49 So what this means is that you have to make sure that you’re getting adequate amounts of
1:28:50 sleep.
1:28:52 It’s not sufficient just to exercise.
1:28:53 You need to get proper sleep.
1:28:57 And I’ve done multiple episodes on how to optimize your sleep, how to improve your sleep,
1:29:00 how to deal with insomnia, shift work.
1:29:04 If you want to learn about any and all of that, either from podcasts or from our newsletter,
1:29:09 go to hubermanlab.com, put sleep into the search function and it will take you to the
1:29:12 episodes and the newsletters that discuss that.
1:29:17 In addition, if you have a specific issue with sleep, like you’re doing shift work or
1:29:22 you’re jet lagged or you are suffering from middle of the night waking or trouble shifting
1:29:27 your schedule because you want to become an early riser, put those terms into the search
1:29:32 function, it will take you to the specific time stamps in those episodes so that you
1:29:35 don’t have to listen to the entire episodes because I realize that some of them are quite
1:29:36 long.
1:29:40 And of course, there’s the newsletter on sleep that lists off the various things that
1:29:44 you should and can be doing to improve your sleep, no matter how well you happen to be
1:29:45 sleeping now.
1:29:51 But tons and tons of zero cost resources there in PDF form and podcast form and on and on.
1:29:55 We also did the six episode series on sleep with Dr. Matthew Walker, one of the world’s
1:29:56 experts in sleep.
1:29:57 So that’s also there.
1:30:00 So you can find all that there.
1:30:06 One question I get a lot is, let’s say I don’t sleep that well, should I exercise?
1:30:12 Well, the short answer is yes, provided that it was just one night of poor sleep.
1:30:15 In fact, there are studies showing that if you’re slightly sleep deprived, meaning one
1:30:20 night’s poor sleep, so most people need somewhere between six and nine hours of sleep varies
1:30:23 by person, varies by age, varies by time of year and so on.
1:30:28 All discussed in that series with Matt Walker.
1:30:32 Most people need six to nine hours, but let’s say you normally get eight or you normally
1:30:36 get seven, but you’re down two hours on sleep for whatever reason.
1:30:38 Should you exercise the next morning?
1:30:42 The short answer is yes, provided it was just one night of poor sleep.
1:30:47 It turns out that exercising after a poor night’s sleep can help offset some of the negative
1:30:50 effects of sleep deprivation on what?
1:30:52 On brain performance and health.
1:30:54 Now you don’t want to get into a habit of this.
1:30:58 You don’t want to get into a habit of using exercise as a way to compensate for sleep
1:30:59 loss.
1:31:04 So if you don’t sleep well for one night, exercise is a great way to offset that sleep
1:31:07 loss effect on the brain or that would otherwise affect the brain.
1:31:09 You can compensate for it by doing some exercise.
1:31:13 Keep in mind, you want to exercise in a way that’s not too intense because you can drive
1:31:16 your immune system down and be more vulnerable to infections.
1:31:19 That’s certainly the case after a poor night’s sleep.
1:31:22 You also want to be really careful with what you do for that exercise in terms of your
1:31:23 coordinated movement.
1:31:26 It’s much easier to get injured when you’re sleep deprived.
1:31:29 In fact, there’s a really nice set of studies.
1:31:33 Lane Norton’s talked about this elsewhere, that the relationship between sleep, where
1:31:37 I should say sleep deprivation and injury is a strong one, and the relationship between
1:31:43 sleep loss and pain and failure to recover from injury is also a strong one.
1:31:47 The direct point being, if you’re slightly sleep deprived, sure, go ahead and exercise.
1:31:51 That will actually help you offset some of the negative effects of that sleep deprivation,
1:31:54 but you want to be careful how you exercise so you don’t get sick and you don’t get injured.
1:31:57 You can keep in mind that if you’re having trouble sleeping or even if you’re a great
1:32:02 sleeper already, getting exercise will further improve the architecture of your sleep.
1:32:06 In fact, there’s some evidence that doing high-intensity interval training can improve
1:32:08 the amount of deep, slow-wave sleep that you get.
1:32:13 There’s some additional data showing that if you do high-intensity training early in
1:32:18 the day, and that’s combined with a bunch of other things that stimulate autonomic arousal.
1:32:19 Here we are again at autonomic arousal.
1:32:20 Things like caffeine.
1:32:22 If that’s in your program, you don’t have to drink caffeine.
1:32:26 Things like getting bright light in your eyes early in the day, definitely do that.
1:32:29 Don’t stare at the sun or any light so bright that it’s dangerous or painful to look at,
1:32:31 but certainly get bright light in your eyes.
1:32:36 All those things that increase autonomic arousal early in the day can also help improve the
1:32:40 amount and the quality of sleep that you get at night, in particular, rapid-eye movement
1:32:43 sleep, which is so critical for learning and memory.
1:32:47 In fact, there’s something called the first night effect, which is the amount and quality
1:32:50 of rapid-eye movement sleep that you get on the first night after trying to learn something
1:32:54 powerfully dictates whether or not you actually learn and remember that thing, because as you
1:32:58 recall, learning and memory neuroplasticity is a two-step process.
1:33:02 You need to be focused and alert during the encoding phase during the learning, but it’s
1:33:07 in states of deep rest, sleep in particular, but also non-sleep deep rest, but rapid-eye
1:33:13 movement sleep is the kind of king of reshaping your brain connections for the better, unloading
1:33:16 the emotional load of experiences that we’re troubling.
1:33:20 That happens during rapid-eye movement sleep, just a little bit of REM deprivation, rapid-eye
1:33:25 movement sleep deprivation will make you more emotional and will make the painful experiences
1:33:28 of recent and distant past also more painful.
1:33:30 Get more rapid-eye movement sleep if you can.
1:33:34 It also consolidates learning of things that you want to remember, again, exercise early
1:33:38 in the day, in particular high-intensity exercise combined with some of the other things we
1:33:43 just discussed, terrific way to improve the amount and quality of sleep that you get at
1:33:44 night.
1:33:47 Of course, all of that geysers up to what?
1:33:51 Better brain health and performance in the short term and in the long term.
1:33:55 I listed off the four types of training that you absolutely want to include in your exercise
1:33:59 regimen if improving your brain health and performance is one of your goals.
1:34:01 Obviously, that should be one of your goals.
1:34:07 Your brain is your central command center for your entire brain, but also your body.
1:34:12 There’s a fifth category of exercise that everyone should include if one’s goal is
1:34:19 to have a better and more resilient and indeed a better performing brain compared to your
1:34:21 age match controls.
1:34:26 To be direct, that fifth category is the one that you absolutely don’t want to do.
1:34:27 What do I mean by that?
1:34:32 Well, there’s an absolutely beautiful literature about a brain area.
1:34:36 I’ve talked a little bit about this before in our episode about tenacity and willpower.
1:34:39 I’ve talked about it on a few other podcasts as well.
1:34:45 It came up during the podcast episode that I did with the one and only David Goggins.
1:34:48 That brain area is the interior mid-singulate cortex.
1:34:54 The interior mid-singulate cortex, very briefly, is a brain area that is powerfully engaged
1:35:01 when we lean into challenges, including physical challenges, but also mental challenges, emotional
1:35:02 challenges.
1:35:08 We get that, “I’m going to push through tenacity and engaging our willpower.”
1:35:10 It’s remarkable to think about this brain area.
1:35:14 This is a brain area, mind you, that when my colleague at Stanford, Joe Parvizzi, putting
1:35:18 a little electrode into, he was doing this for other reasons related to important neurosurgeries
1:35:23 that patients needed and stimulated that particular brain area, anterior mid-singulate cortex.
1:35:28 Joe reported immediately feeling as if there was some impending challenge, but that they
1:35:31 were going to lean into that challenge.
1:35:32 Remarkable.
1:35:36 This brain area has intense connectivity with many, many other brain areas, the dopaminergic
1:35:41 system, the so-called arousal system, so multiple brain areas involved in arousal.
1:35:44 Areas of the brain that are involved in learning.
1:35:46 Areas of the brain that are involved in stress.
1:35:49 Areas of the brain that are involved in lots and lots of different things.
1:35:54 It’s a major hub for inputs from other brain areas and outputs to other brain areas.
1:35:58 But here’s what’s most remarkable about the anterior mid-singulate cortex.
1:36:01 There’s a category of humans referred to as super-agers.
1:36:06 Super-agers are people that defy the aging process, at least at the level of cognition.
1:36:11 They maintain the volume of certain brain areas well into older age when their age-matched
1:36:18 counterparts are losing the same brain areas, meaning people in their 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s
1:36:20 have brain areas that are shrinking.
1:36:26 Even in cases where people don’t have Alzheimer’s dementia, areas of the brain are shrinking.
1:36:30 Super-agers are people that maintain the healthy full volume of these brain areas, and indeed
1:36:34 in some cases, the volume, the size of these brain areas continues to increase into their
1:36:36 later years.
1:36:41 One of the brain areas that maintains or increases volume in these super-agers is the anterior
1:36:42 mid-singulate cortex.
1:36:44 And there aren’t many other brain areas that do that.
1:36:50 The anterior mid-singulate cortex is the main site that can be tacked to this phenomenon
1:36:51 of super-aging.
1:36:55 Now, super-aging in super-agers is a bit of a misnomer because what’s happening in these
1:36:59 people is they’re not just holding on to the volume of their anterior mid-singulate cortex.
1:37:05 They’re also maintaining healthy cognition, which is flexible strategy, context-dependent
1:37:08 learning, their memory, their working memory.
1:37:13 They’re doing phenomenally well, not just for their age, but even compared to some much
1:37:14 younger people.
1:37:17 So these super-agers are really interesting both for sake of what they can do into their
1:37:22 later years and because their anterior mid-singulate cortex is holding on to its size and in some
1:37:25 cases increasing its size.
1:37:30 What can allow you to activate and increase the size of your anterior mid-singulate cortex?
1:37:32 Well, it’s very simple.
1:37:34 To do things that you don’t want to do.
1:37:35 I should be very clear.
1:37:39 We’re talking about things that can be done safely that aren’t going to damage you physically
1:37:45 or psychologically, but we are talking about exercise or in some cases cognitive exercise,
1:37:50 but today we’re talking about physical exercise that you would much rather not do.
1:37:53 So if you’re like me and you love resistance training, it can be hard.
1:37:57 Some days I want to do it more than others and sometimes the workouts are much harder
1:37:59 than others, but I love it.
1:38:03 But if I want to maintain and increase the size of my anterior mid-singulate cortex,
1:38:09 I absolutely have to find some form of physical exercise that I would much rather not do,
1:38:13 but as I mentioned before, that’s also safe physically and that’s not going to damage
1:38:14 me emotionally.
1:38:16 I don’t know what kind of physical exercise would damage me emotionally, but you get
1:38:18 the point.
1:38:20 This brain area has been explored in a number of different studies.
1:38:25 So successful dieters increase the size of their anterior mid-singulate cortex.
1:38:29 People that fail to reach a goal, a diet goal or other goal, experience a shrinking of their
1:38:31 anterior mid-singulate cortex.
1:38:38 There’s also examples of physical exercise, increasing anterior mid-singulate cortex, skill
1:38:39 challenges and on and on.
1:38:44 The important point is that the anterior mid-singulate cortex is agnostic with respect to what you
1:38:49 do except that it has to be something that you don’t want to do if you want to build
1:38:50 and maintain its size.
1:38:55 And that building and maintaining of the anterior mid-singulate cortex size is strongly correlated.
1:39:01 That’s not necessarily causal, but it’s strongly correlated with this super aging phenomenon.
1:39:06 There’s a wonderful review about the anterior mid-singulate cortex that was authored by none
1:39:08 other than Lisa Feldman Barrett.
1:39:09 She came up earlier in this episode.
1:39:15 She’s a world-class researcher on the topic of emotions and the basis of emotions, etc.
1:39:20 The title of this paper is The Tenacious Brain, How the anterior mid-singulate cortex contributes
1:39:21 to achieving goals.
1:39:25 And there’s one figure in this paper, and I just want to summarize a couple of things
1:39:28 from because it’s just like a wow figure.
1:39:29 There aren’t many figures like this.
1:39:33 I mean, this is a review article, so this figure includes panels pooling from a bunch
1:39:39 of different studies, but I’m going to just highlight a few of these by paraphrasing what’s
1:39:40 in the figure legend.
1:39:41 Okay?
1:39:42 So bear with me here.
1:39:43 I think you’ll find this very interesting.
1:39:44 Okay.
1:39:48 So you can’t see the pictures because many people are listening to this on audio, but
1:39:49 you can certainly look up the paper.
1:39:52 You provide a link to it in the show note captions, but these points are worth paying
1:39:54 attention to.
1:39:59 Spontaneous anterior mid-singulate cortex activity predicts grit, this psychological phenomenon
1:40:00 that we refer to as grit.
1:40:03 Now, this is teased out in a study of grit.
1:40:09 Grit is this ability to lean into challenge and the mere spontaneous activity, right?
1:40:10 Not evoked activity.
1:40:13 There’s spontaneous activity, which is the activity that occurs sort of naturally as
1:40:17 a consequence of engaging in a particular thought pattern or behavior.
1:40:19 And then there’s evoked activity when you stimulate a brain area.
1:40:22 This is spontaneous activity.
1:40:27 Spontaneous anterior mid-singulate activity is associated with the psychological phenomenon,
1:40:30 the verb that we call grit.
1:40:32 And grit can be thought of as an adjective, right?
1:40:36 Somebody’s really gritty, but it should best be thought of as a verb.
1:40:39 It’s the leaning into challenge.
1:40:44 Greater anterior mid-singulate cortex activity is associated with higher levels of persistence.
1:40:46 This again was teased out in a study of persistence.
1:40:49 So these aren’t just philosophical statements or theoretical statements.
1:40:54 These are based on brain imaging studies where people are being challenged with a particular
1:41:00 set of challenges while they’re in a so-called fMRI, functional magnetic resonance imaging
1:41:01 machine.
1:41:07 Activation of the anterior mid-singulate cortex is associated with grit and with persistence.
1:41:11 And anterior mid-singulate signal is associated with willingness to exert more effort.
1:41:16 If people have to exert more effort and they’re willing to do that, boom, anterior mid-singulate
1:41:19 cortex activity goes up.
1:41:25 Also anterior mid-singulate activity increases, get this, during effort-magnitude estimation.
1:41:28 Even when people are just trying to gauge how much effort something’s going to take,
1:41:32 that starts to initiate activity of the anterior mid-singulate cortex, the, oh boy, this is
1:41:33 going to be a big one.
1:41:34 I got to do this.
1:41:37 And I’ll explain how I engage my anterior mid-singulate cortex.
1:41:40 People have to decide if that’s something that you hate enough so that you can use it
1:41:42 too.
1:41:43 Almost done here, folks.
1:41:47 Anterior mid-singulate signal tracks the subjective value of effort exerted.
1:41:53 As people start to track how much effort they’re exerting, anterior mid-singulate cortex activity
1:41:55 goes up.
1:41:59 And last but not least, anterior mid-singulate cortex stimulation, so this is no longer spontaneous
1:42:04 activity, but stimulation increases the will to persevere.
1:42:05 Incredible.
1:42:11 Never before, meaning never before reading this article and learning about anterior mid-singulate
1:42:15 cortex, which, again, is largely the consequence of work done somewhere between the years of
1:42:21 2010 and now, 2025, did we even understand what the anterior mid-singulate cortex is
1:42:22 there for and is doing.
1:42:27 It could do other things too, but this is an extraordinary set of findings and an extraordinary
1:42:30 brain structure that everyone should know about.
1:42:34 And that’s why number five on that list, if you want to improve brain function and brain
1:42:40 health over time, is to do something you really don’t want to do, something really challenging,
1:42:44 both psychologically challenging and physically challenging, at least once per week.
1:42:48 Make sure it’s safe psychologically and physically, but do that thing.
1:42:54 For me, I must confess, it’s deliberate cold exposure, but it’s deliberate cold exposure
1:42:56 under particular conditions.
1:43:01 I’ll be the first to say that I love getting into the ice bath or the cold plunge or taking
1:43:06 a cold shower after I’ve been in a hot sauna for 20 or 30 minutes or after a long run where
1:43:10 I’m sweating and I want to cool off or on a hot summer day.
1:43:15 But most of the time, that’s not the case, meaning most of the time when I do deliberate
1:43:19 cold exposure and sometimes I’ll do it by cold shower, which, by the way, is zero cost.
1:43:22 You’ll even save you on your heating bill, so you don’t need to buy any equipment or
1:43:26 you could do a cold plunge or an ice bath, but you don’t need one.
1:43:30 Most of the time, when I even think about getting into the cold plunge or taking a cold
1:43:34 shower, that is very likely increasing my anterior midsingulate cortex activity because
1:43:36 I love, love, love the heat.
1:43:37 I love sauna.
1:43:38 I’m very heat adapted.
1:43:42 I’m comfortable at very high temperatures in the sauna.
1:43:45 I don’t hate the cold, but I close to hate the cold.
1:43:49 So for me, the first wall to get over, the first bit of resistance that’s really hard
1:43:51 for me to get over is to walk towards the cold plunge.
1:43:53 Then it’s to take the lid off.
1:43:54 Then it’s to look at the thing.
1:43:58 Then it’s to get in, but I force myself to do it.
1:44:01 I make sure that I do it safely and I make sure that I do it for about one to three minutes,
1:44:06 sometimes longer, but I do it because yes, deliberate cold exposure increases release
1:44:10 of the so-called catecholamines, dopamine epinephrine nor epinephrine.
1:44:14 Also yes, I know that those catecholamines are going to make me feel much better after
1:44:16 I get out of the cold plunge for many, many hours.
1:44:22 That’s been established, but I also do deliberate cold exposure by cold shower or by cold immersion
1:44:26 because I hate it and because I know that by doing it, I’m going to be activating my
1:44:30 will to persevere, my grit, my willpower.
1:44:33 Now, today’s discussion is not about deliberate cold exposure.
1:44:35 It’s about exercise.
1:44:40 What I’ve started doing in recent months and I’m certainly going to continue into 2025
1:44:46 is to start adding some form of exercise that I absolutely don’t want to do in order to
1:44:48 activate my anterior mid-singulate cortex.
1:44:52 For me, because my schedule is very full, I’m already doing six workouts per week.
1:44:53 Again, some of them are shorter.
1:44:54 Some of them are longer.
1:44:56 I don’t have a lot of extra time to exercise.
1:45:00 I don’t have a lot of time to start rolling jiu-jitsu for a couple hours a week, which
1:45:03 I wouldn’t loathe, but there’s a big barrier for me to do that sort of thing.
1:45:08 So maybe it’s perfect for activating AMCC, anterior mid-singulate cortex.
1:45:12 Rather, what I’ve decided to do is to include the one thing that I’ve been putting off for
1:45:19 years that frankly, I may enjoy down the line, but that I don’t enjoy currently, and that’s
1:45:26 to do some sort of really coordinated specific motor activity that has to be done precisely
1:45:31 or very precisely before you can say that you’ve “done it right.”
1:45:35 For me, the thing that I’m selecting, because I already like to jump rope, and I can do
1:45:38 a few different things with a jump rope, I’m not super skilled, but I can already jump
1:45:46 rope, is something that my friend Mark Bell exposed me to, which is this rope flow thing.
1:45:49 Feel free to laugh if you want, but this stuff is hard and it’s really, really cool.
1:45:51 The rope flow involves just taking a rope.
1:45:55 There may be specific commercial brands of these, but I was told I can just use a kind
1:45:59 of thick rope that you buy at the hardware store, like a dog leash type rope.
1:46:00 And you can look this up online, we’ll provide a link to it.
1:46:05 There’s a specific pattern of moving the rope, where you’re not actually jumping through
1:46:09 it, so it’s not jumping rope, but you’re actually moving it in front of and behind
1:46:12 your body and from side to side, and involves a lot of different shifting from one limb
1:46:14 to the other in very deliberate ways.
1:46:17 And as I’m discussing this, I realize that I really don’t want to do this, but I know
1:46:22 it’s going to be very useful for me, which is exactly why I’m going to use it in 2025
1:46:25 to enhance my anterior mid-singulate cortex activity.
1:46:29 The only fear being that I’m going to start to like it, and then I’ll have to find something
1:46:32 else to engage my anterior mid-singulate cortex.
1:46:35 And perhaps at that point, I’ll look to you guys in the comment sections to figure out
1:46:39 what sorts of exercise I would hate the most in order to make sure that I’m getting my
1:46:46 anterior mid-singulate cortex activation, because, yes, increased coordination is great.
1:46:48 Who wouldn’t want that?
1:46:52 But mainly because I want to improve my brain performance and brain function, both in the
1:46:55 short term and over time.
1:46:58 So if you want, in the comment section on YouTube, because that’s where I can see the
1:47:01 comments best, or perhaps on Spotify as well, where they now have a comment section, I
1:47:06 guess Apple has a comment section too, YouTube, Apple or Spotify, put in the comment section
1:47:12 the form of exercise that’s both psychologically and physically safe for you to embrace, but
1:47:17 that you would loathe to do, and that you’re going to perhaps, no, not perhaps, that you’re
1:47:20 going to commit to doing in 2025.
1:47:24 And then we can compare and contrast, and we can all see which ones we hate the most,
1:47:26 and then we can exchange which exercises we hate the most.
1:47:29 And everyone can laugh at us for doing these things that we hate, and yet we’ll be the
1:47:35 ones laughing because our anterior mid-singulate cortices will be nice and plump well into
1:47:39 our old ages, and everybody else will be wondering where the comment section is.
1:47:43 Thank you everybody for joining me for today’s discussion all about how exercise can be leveraged
1:47:47 to improve brain health and brain performance.
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