Do you want to think better, to find solutions to your daily problems a lot easier or to have the motivation to learn new and productive things? Well, who doesn’t? The more you live, the more you should learn, says an old proverb. If yoga, meditation, or simply enjoying your habits and having a satisfying life can’t represent a solution, you should just run. Believe it or not, that precisely what a new study suggests, which was presented at the 2019 ECNP Congress in Copenhagen.
Probably everybody knows that jogging can help you have a good mood or to release anxiety, but the new study done by a group of German scientists led by Dr. Jonathan Repple from University Hospital Muenster from Germany shows that if you are persistent with the treadmill, your brainpower will be seriously boosted.
Human Connectome Project was the primary source of inspiration for the conclusion of the German scientists. This project is a volunteer-based program were people of an average age of 30 years old contributed their MRIs to a database for the purpose of scientific research. Researchers concluded that the healthy participants were able to walk the farthest distances within two minutes, scoring the highest results in the cognitive functions test.
Jogging Is Ideal For Brain Health, Boosting Cognitive Functions
Also, the fittest participants in the study displayed a better structure of white matter, a substance which improves the efficiency of brain nerves. It was surprising to see that even at the young population, the cognitive level decreases as fitness levels drop, as Repple himself concludes. He also adds that as “we knew how this might be important in an elderly population which does not necessarily have good health, but to see this happening in 30-year-olds is surprising.”
“The great strength of this work is the size of the database. Normally when you are dealing with MRI work, a sample of 30 is pretty good, but the existence of this large MRI database allowed us to eliminate possibly misleading factors and strengthened the analysis considerably,” said Dr. Jonathan Repple, the leader of the study.
Without any doubt, the German scientists’ study shows pretty clear that a basic level of fitness is a preventable risk factor for brain health. The big question after all of this is that actually making people fitter will improve their brain health, as Dr. Repple also puts it. We all know that being fat is bad for your physical health, but is it too bad for your mental health as well? In short, jogging is ideal for cognitive functions.
