More Reasons to Keep Exercising
Your brain needs exercise.
Gretchen Reynolds at the New York Times Wellblog, writes about a study looking at whether the brain benefits of exercise persist.
Not for long, apparently.
Researchers took two group of rats. One group exercised for a few weeks and the other did not. As we would expect, the exercising rats did better in memory and anxiety tests.
Then they took away the exercising rats exercise wheels (treadmills) and tracked the animals over time.
They found that, after only a week of inactivity, the rats that had run were much faster on the water maze test than the control animals. They also had at least twice as many newborn neurons in the hippocampus.
But those advantages faded after several more weeks of not running.
I could have told them this, based on human studies. All my running friends go to pieces when they are forced to rest due to injury or illness. But I suppose it is nice to see scientific validation of this observation.