SCIENTISTS HAVE JUST given you one more reason not to skip your workout. Regular exercise could be turning back the age of your brain—by almost a year.
It didn’t take a lot of exercise, either. When people exercised for 150 minutes a week, their brains stayed younger. (If the number sounds familiar, it’s what multiple health organizations, including the CDC recommends for physical activity.) All they did was break their workouts into two 60-minute cardio sessions in the researchers’ lab, followed by a half-hour home workout.
When scientists reviewed the MRI brain scans before and after the year-long trial, they saw that the brains of the regular exercisers were 0.6 years younger than when they first started out. Researchers also looked at the brains of people who didn’t work out at all. Their brains were 0.35 years older. Put together, the difference in brain aging between both groups was nearly a year.
“These absolute changes were modest, but even a one-year shift in brain age could matter over the course of decades,” says Lu Wan, research neuroscience data scientist at the AdventHealth Research Institute and lead study author. Wan and her team unveiled the full results in the Journal of Sport and Health Science.
Considering the 130 people in the study were between 26 and 58, the findings suggest there’s still time to help your brain even if you’ve been sedentary for most of your life.
“Each additional ‘year’ of brain age is associated with meaningful differences in later-life health,” adds Kirk Erickson, PhD, director of translational neuroscience at AdventHealth Research Institute and senior author. “From a lifespan perspective, nudging the brain in a younger direction in midlife could be very important. If we can slow brain aging before major problems appear, we may be able to delay or reduce the risk of later-life cognitive decline and dementia.”
How Does Exercise Help Maintain a Younger Brain?
THE RESEARCHERS LOOKED at several potential pathways exercise might work through—changes in fitness, body composition, blood pressure, or potential changes in a protein called BDNF that helps promote the creation of new brain connections. While exercise improved people’s overall fitness, the team did not find that any of these measures could statistically explain the reversal in brain aging in this trial.
“That was a surprise,” Wan says. “We expected improvements in fitness or blood pressure to account for the effect, but they didn’t. Exercise may be acting through additional mechanisms we haven’t captured yet, such as subtle changes in brain structure, inflammation, vascular health or other molecular factors.”
Still, there’s no need to wait for scientists to figure out the mechanism. Taking action now—whether you’re in your 30s, 40s, and 50s can make a difference later in maintaining a youthful brain.
“People often ask, ‘Is there anything I can do now to protect my brain later?’” DR. Erickson says. “Our findings support the idea that following current exercise guidelines—150 minutes per week of moderate-to-vigorous aerobic activity—may help keep the brain biologically younger, even in midlife.”
Jocelyn Solis-Moreira, MS is the associate health & fitness for Men’s Health and has previously written for CNN, Scientific American, Popular Science, and National Geographic before joining the brand. When she’s not working, she’s doing circus arts or working towards the perfect pull-up.
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