Exercise can boost your mental and cognitive health — but not all forms and intensities of exercise affect the brain equally. In fact, according to a new Dartmouth study, the effects of exercise are much more nuanced. It found that specific intensities of exercise over a long period of time are asso
ciated with different aspects of memory and mental health. The findings were recently published in the journal“Mental health and memory are central to nearly everything we do in our everyday lives,” says lead author Jeremy Manning. He is an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth. “Our study is trying to build a foundation for understanding how different intensities of physical exercise affect different aspects of mental and cognitive health.
Prior research has usually focused on the effects of exercise on memory over a relatively short timeframe, such as over several days or weeks. However, Dartmouth scientists wanted to analyze the effects over a much longer timescale. The data collected included average heart rates, daily step counts, how much time was spent exercising in different “heart rate zones” as defined by FitBit , and other information collected over a full calendar year.
Participants who had been more active over the prior year tended to show better memory performance overall. However, the specific areas of improvement depended on which types of activity people did. The researchers discovered that participants who often exercised at moderate intensities tended to perform better on the episodic memory tasks while those who often exercised at high intensities did better on the spatial memory tasks.
“When it comes to physical activity, memory, and mental health, there’s a really complicated dynamic at play that cannot be summarized in single sentences like ‘walking improves your memory’ or ‘stress hurts your memory,’” says Manning. “Instead, specific forms of physical activity and specific aspects of mental health seem to affect each aspect of memory differently.”
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