These are the 5 benefits of exercise for your brain

He sedentary lifestyle has established itself as one of the main hidden risks to our health, with consequences not only on the cardiovascular or muscular system, but also on the functioning of our brain. This is how the neuroscientist indicates it José Luis Trejo, responsible for the Lifestyle and Cognition Group at the Cajal Institute of the CSIC.

In his work ‘What do we know about? The brain in motion (CSIC-Catarata), the specialist explains that exercise regularly It has a direct impact on mental well-being, memory and emotional state.

In statements to Europa Press Salud Infosalus, Dr. Trejo assures that it is not enough to exercise one hour a day, but that it is also necessary reduce the time we spend sitting through small movement “snacks” spread throughout the day.

Furthermore, he highlights that in the brain more is not always better, since the excess intensity and stress of professional sports can reduce some of the benefits. “The biggest enemy to our health is a sedentary lifestyle. Physical exercise produces undoubted benefits throughout the body, in our health and, of course, in the brain,” he says.

According to the expert, exercising regularly provides multiple advantages to brain function, including:

1. Increases cognitive capacity and mental performance
2. Facilitates the connection between neurons, improving synapses
3. Enhances the functions of the hippocampus, promoting learning and memory
4. Helps regulate mood, with anxiolytic and antidepressant effects
5. Increases blood flow to the most active areas of the brain, especially the most active

For the effects to be real, José Luis Trejo points out that exercise should be maintained for a minimum amount of time. “We are talking about 30-40 minutes of continuous exercise, and if you do more, the better; but there are recent studies published that show that, regardless of the exercise you do per day or week, you must avoid a sedentary lifestyle,” he adds.

In this sense, he insists that there is little point in training if you then spend the rest of the day sitting in an office. That is why he defends the importance of the so-called “exercise snacks”, “very short things, 5 minutes”, designed to break inactivity (“climb two floors twice, do some squats next to the table, which increases the heart rate a little, without sweating above all, but that sedentary lifestyle is interrupted”).

Finally, he recommends repeating these active breaks frequently, “a few minutes every hour,” since “it has been shown that interrupting a sedentary lifestyle with these exercise snacks increases good health, regardless of how much exercise you do.”