Are You Ready For Xx1c Fitness?!

Posted on February 27, 2008
Filed Under Self Improvement |

There’s an exciting concept emerging which may rapidly influence the way we view key areas of fitness:

· Market: Participation rates; “more people, more active, more of the time”.

· Message: The benefits of active living across the lifecycle (from young to old)

· Media: The optimal exercise mix: Frequency, Intensity, Time + Type (FITT)

This entirely new field of scientific discovery is being termed “Cognitive or Brain Fitness”. Indeed more has been learnt about the brain in the last 10-15yr, than the total sum of knowledge before then, and its significance could be widespread.

Train the Brain

Currently attention in “training the brain” is centered on the older adult. No target group is more diverse in terms of psychological and physical function, and has the most to gain (by offsetting age and inactivity-related decline). Key concerns include brain alertness and memory.

Here’s how exercise may directly contribute to brain health:

Exercise helps generate new brain cells, even in the aging brain.

With just two months of exercise there are more brain cells and that higher levels of exercise were significantly more beneficial than lower amounts, although any exercise was better than none.

Starting an exercise program early in life is an effective way to lower the risk of developing Parkinson’s disease later in life.

As little as three hours a week of brisk walking has been shown to halt, and even reverse, the brain shrinkage that starts in a person’s 40s, especially in the regions responsible for memory and higher cognition. Exercise increased the brain’s volume of gray matter (actual neurons) and white matter (connections between neurons).

Exercise can stave off neural decline, and even roll back some normal age-related deterioration of brain structure. Exercise improves learning through increased blood supply and growth hormones.

Exercise is an anti-depressant by reducing stress and promoting neurogenesis. Exercise protects the brain from damage and disease, as well as speeding the recovery.

As we get old and maybe less able to exercise, cognitive stimulation can help to compensate. Enrichment initiated at any age can significantly improve memory function, but is most beneficial when started young. Exercise plus mental challenges in middle age — when many people start to notice subtle memory changes — may offer the strongest, most widespread benefits for memory function.

Evolving from “use it or lose it” to “use it and improve it”

Conversely, science is also discovering that “mental workouts” are the key to expanding your neural systems and making them more communicative. This means you can alter the physical makeup of your brain by training it. Every time we learn a new skill, concept or fact, we change the physical composition of our brains (its “neuroplasticity”).

The more “cognitively fit” you are, the better equipped you are to make decisions, solve problems, and deal with stress and change. Cognitive fitness helps you become more open to alternative perspectives.

By regarding the brain’s alertness as the result of cognitive fitness, it can be seen that cognition (thinking + performance) is really a set of skills that we can train systematically. Effectively, we can cultivate our own neuronal networks.

Individuals who lead mentally stimulating lives, through education, occupation and leisure activities, have reduced risk of developing Alzheimer’s symptoms. Studies suggest that they have 35-40% less risk of manifesting the disease.

So if expertise is developed through practice, the practice that has the best results is repetition with increased difficulty. Maintaining brain fitness then requires a change from our normal and mostly automatic ways of doing things. It becomes a challenging and lifelong process of nurturing new brain cells and neural networks. Our experiences literally shape our brains, and vice versa.

Given too that wisdom strengthens with age (attentional control is one of the last cognitive abilities to develop in normal brain development), cognitive fitness could change the way society views ageing and what it means to be “old”.

Whilst metal stimulation is a good thing, too much may not be!

Studies suggest that neurons are adversely affected by stress as well as a lack of stimulation. Neurotoxins may be hampered in their ability to form new patterns of connectivity and may lose synaptic connections. This reduction in new cell creation, due to chronic stress, affects brain effectiveness.

Hence reducing stress, and the stress hormones, in your system is critical to your brain fitness and overall wellbeing. Prolonged exposure to the adrenal steroid hormones like cortisol, released during the stress response, can damage the brain by blocking the formation of new neurons.

Older neurons can be regenerated with learning and environmental stimulation, but while short-term stress may improve attention and memory, chronic stress leads indirectly to cell death and hampers our ability to make changes and be creative enough to even think of possible changes to reduce the stress.

Notice today how creativity is shrivelling and mistakes are multiplying? To inoculate yourself against this epidemic, regularly replenish your personal energy through restorative rituals and brief breaks throughout your day.

Relaxation classes through meditation, tai chi, yoga, or other techniques can lower blood pressure, slow respiration, slow metabolism, and release muscle tension.

Plus the human brain is a social brain. We are born into a social system, learn in social systems, and age in social systems. Socially-orientated classes and networks can help foster trust, support, and relaxation, which are important for both mental stimulation and stress reduction.

“It’s never too late” and “never too early”

Cognitive fitness is not only about seniors or about memory. The race is now on to discover mental and physical disciplines that can help busy executives sustain their ability to lead despite increasing demands on their time and energy.

People of all ages can benefit from a variety of regular brain exercises. Exercising our brains systematically is as important as exercising our bodies (and the earlier we begin in life the better)! If you’re still not convinced your mind creates your body, just ask any postural expert!.

Plus there’s a ripple effect. Whilst attention is currently being placed on seniors for memory and mental agility etc, what is being learned also has relevance for stressed-out executives, gameboy-addicted kids, and the mentally ill.

“Currently over 1m people in the UK are receiving incapacity benefits because depression and stress have left them unfit to work.”

Ironically, in maximising the physical and mental agility of kids through to executives, the benefits get passed upwards as these same individuals transform into more able functioning “seniors” than their inactive “dogmatic” peers.

To sum up, the astute amongst you will have recognised XX1C fitness as 21st Century Fitness, where mind + body exercise really comes of age.

Maybe it represents “the code” to getting more people active, through a more appealing message. Let’s review:

Market: Brain fitness represents a friendly, gentle and wellness-orientated message to people of all ages, shapes and sizes. A value-driven message rather than a physically-oriented one, to which all can equally aspire.

Message: Working-out both mind AND body simultaneously (as one), in pursuit of the skills, confidence, and independence to lead a long active and satisfying life.

Media: An emphasis on group-exercise, “the experience”, focus and concentration (mindful vs mindless activity); novelty and innovation; challenging, strengthening and expanding neural networks.

Sign me up. How about you?

Noel Lyons self-publishes Personal Trainers Online, a fitness business coaching blog for the NEW breed of fitness professional ( http://www.personaltrainersonline.org/wp ). Noel Lyons also leads the busy person’s fitness club (Get F.I.T.). You can grab free memberships today by visiting: personaltrainers-online.co.uk + getfit.es

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