How To Exercise To Boost Your Brainpower

Perform three 30-minute sessions of cardiovascular exercise every week.

Your brain, just like the rest of your body, needs an efficient and fast transfer of oxygen and nutrients to its cells to perform its best. Why do you think you breathe and eat? The better your cardiovascular health is, the better this transfer is, and the more quickly and effectively you can process information and make decisions. This will improve your critical thinking processes, focus, concentration, and mental quickness.

It doesn’t matter what kind of cardio exercise you perform, the most important thing is that you get your heart rate up because it's only when you increase your heart rate that your body begins reconstructing its systems to make you stronger. There have been countless studies on the optimal heart rate to maximize your cardiovascular health, and after finding and perusing several of them, I would recommend that you follow this general routine:

  1. Start with a slow, five minute warm-up to allow your body to prepare itself for exercise.
  2. Get your heart rate up to 175 minus your age beats per minute for the next 20 minutes. For example, if you’re 30, your target heart rate is 145. If you haven’t done cardio exercise for a long time, subtract another 5 to 10 beats per minute and slowly build on this. If you’re in really good cardio shape, raise it 5 to 10 beats per minute.
  3. End with a five minute slow-down period much the same as your warm-up, slowly dropping your heart rate back down to its normal rate.

Not very difficult at all, is it? If you hate exercising it’s usually because you don’t have the right motivation. For me, knowing that I’m actually making myself smarter by exercising provides an unbelievable amount of motivation. I’m sure you’ve heard the adage “A healthy body means a healthy mind”, but not only is it healthy, it’s more POWERFUL, more AGILE, more CREATIVE, more EFFICIENT, and QUICKER than ever before. And you can actually feel this effect IMMEDIATELY after working out, it feels like your brain has found an extra couple of cylinders to fire on. The more you work out, the more this feeling will become standard, even when you haven’t just finished a workout. If you don’t feel this afterwards it means you worked out TOO HARD, your heart rate was too high and you burned all your blood sugar leaving you exhausted. I’ll talk more about this in a couple of paragraphs.

rowing

During exercise the blood vessels in your brain dilate, allowing oxygen and nutrients to flood your neurons. After exercise the blood vessels constrict again and oxygen flow and nutrient transfer is reduced. But if you continue to work out, your brain will undergo more permanent changes that allow your neurons to receive efficient oxygen and nutrient transfer ALL THE TIME.

If you want advice on what to do for cardio exercise: pick something you enjoy doing, or at least something you don’t hate doing. It might just become more enjoyable every time you do it since now you’ll consciously observe differences in your cognition and become excited. Can you say “addict”? I get bored very easily, so I find that mixing up my workouts suits me best. Running, swimming, rowing, and cycling are my staples, but I frequently throw in other activities like basketball, tennis, ultimate frisbee, racquetball, dancing, power yoga, or even an intense game of ping-pong (oh yeah, ping-pong can make you sweat!).

cycling

You should feel ENERGIZED AND FOCUSED after your workout, not exhausted. If you feel exhausted it’s because your heart rate was too high during your workout. There is a point of exertion at which your body switches to “panic mode” and starts burning all the sugar that’s in your blood more rapidly than it can be replenished. This heart rate is usually somewhere around 185 minus your age, and if you workout at this level for 20 minutes it will take your body hours to recover and get everything back in balance, leaving you tired. It’s hard to be smarter when you’re tired, isn’t it? To make sure you’re hitting somewhere near your target rate, you can buy a heart rate monitor, or just take along your watch and count the number of times your heart beats in 10 seconds, and multiply it by six.

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