There are many reasons to exercise. Protecting your brain health and optimizing your thinking ability is one of them. In fact, there’s compelling evidence that exercise produces large cognitive gains, improves memory, and helps fight dementia.
For example, a 2010 study on primates revealed that regular exercise helped the monkeys learn new tasks twice as quickly as non-exercising monkeys, and researchers believe this might hold true for people as well.
Exercise helps protect and improve your brain function by:
- Improving and increasing blood flow to your brain
- Increasing production of nerve-protecting compounds
- Improving development and survival of neurons
- Reducing damaging plaques in your brain
- Altering the way these damaging proteins reside inside your brain, which appears to slow the development of Alzheimer’s disease
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