New data is constantly being produced to tell us about how many times we should exercise per week and the amount of time we should be getting active. But from my experience, it's mostly concerning cardio. You should be getting at least 30 minutes of cardio 4 times a week in order to maintain...blah blah blah. I never payed too much attention to these things because they're all so similar and frankly I think frequency of workouts is very dependent on the individual. That's why I was interested when I stumbled upon the article "Lift Weights, Improve Your Memory". I don't think I'd ever read or heard anything about how weight lifting could help you beyond tightening and enlarging those muscles.
For the study, the participants were given 90 photos to observe, but not told to memorize, on a computer screen. The pictures were evenly distributed between positive, negative, and neutral images. Everyone then sat at a leg extension resistance exercise machine. Half of participants were asked to extend and contract each leg at their personal maximum effort 50 times. The control group sat in the chair and allowed the machine and the experimenter to move their legs. Throughout the process, each participant’s blood pressure and heart rate were monitored. After 48 hours, the participants returned to the lab and were presented with a series of 180 pictures. 90 of the pictures were originals and 90 of them were completely new photos. When asked to recall which ones were seen earlier, the control group recalled about 50 percent of the photos from the first session. Those who exercised remembered about 60 percent.
Along with weightlifting, the study concluded that similar exercises such as squats could be done to see similar results. These exercises were targeted to elicit responses of short term stress. According to the article "research has linked memory enhancements to acute stress responses, usually from psychological stressors such as public speaking." Nobody likes to be stressed out but perhaps a little bit of it is good for us after all.
The article proved to be a very interesting read, however I am pretty skeptical on drawing conclusions from data that changed from 50 to 60% recall. That doesn't seem to be enough information for me to confidently accept what they are trying to prove.
The link for the article can be found here:
http://neurosciencenews.com/memory-exercise-neuroscience-1384/
While reading this, I agree that a 10% change doesn't seem like enough information. Especially since exercise and strength are known to improve fatigue, which I feel would have an influence on mental performance. Obviously working out has many benefits, but I believe that working out may have an indirect effect on symptoms (such as energy level, sleep patterns, etc.) that can affect memory performance (versus working out having a direct cause as the article suggests). I did think it was interesting how they collected saliva samples, I wasn't aware you could detect neurotransmitters that way. Maybe for their next study they can research those who have been working out regularly (the past 6 months consistently) versus those who work out two days before the study and look at even more aspects that can affect memory performance that working out improves.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad you chose this article! It's refreshing to see a different take on exercise than the normal cardio studies and what good or bad that can do for the brain and body. It makes me wonder if the same principles that cause cardio exercise to be good for metal health is what is at play here. I would assume that the same chemicals are being released by lifting weights as they are with cardio, so if the study was repeated with people doing cardio I wonder if they would have the same results of increased memory recall. I also wonder how big their study was because if it was a very large study, that 10% may be more significant than it seems.
ReplyDeleteThis is an extremely interesting article! However, I agree that recall only increased 10% doesn't seem to be significant enough to say for certain that lifting weights improves memory. I would be interested to see the numerical results for the study and statistical tests that were conducted. Although I completely agree that exercise is beneficial for the brain (I'm able to focus better after I have worked out), I feel like the results could have been influenced by other factors, not just lifting weights. I would also be curious to see if the same results were obtained if instead of lifting weights, participants ran around a track or did some type of cardio exercise to see if the results are generalizable for any type of exercise or if it is just lifting weights.
ReplyDeleteAs someone who only works out about three times a week I find this very interesting! The fact that hitting the gym can improve memory is a great find especially for college students who are trying everything to do better one exams and assignments! Even though the percentage was only a little bit higher, maybe if the experiment were done over a longer period of time then the results would be more significant. This experiment is only over 48 hours, imagine if it were over 6 months to a year (if an experiment like that could be designed). I'm curious if this is applied to just working out in general, like cardio, yoga, etc. If so, the more research done on this the better!
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