Tips To Spark Your Brain With Exercise
Did you know you can beat stress, lift your mood, fight memory loss, sharpen your intellect, and function better than ever simply by elevating your heart rate and breaking a sweat?
Here are my top 5 ways to Spark your brain:
- Get Back On Your Feet. Walk at a brisk pace for 20 minutes a day.
- High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT). HIIT is alternating short periods of intense training with less intense recovery periods. For example:
- 1 min sprint on a treadmill or elliptical
- 30 seconds of rest
- 6 rounds
- Stay Flexible. It’s important to stretch, but it’s equally important to keep your mind flexible. Do something every day that is physically and mentally challenging. For example:
- Learn to play a sport like golf, tennis, swimming or even bocce.
- Resistance Training. We all know that lifting weights helps to improve muscle tone, strong bones, and a lean tummy line, but resistance training also helps to strengthen the connections in your brain. Do this routine for best results:
- Push (bench press) 1/2 of your body weight 10x
- Pull (row) 1/2 your body weight 10x
- Squat holding 1/2 your body weight on your back or in your hands (kettlebells or dumbells)
- 4 rounds with 2 min rest after the squats
- If the weight is too light add weight so that rep 10 is challenging
- If the weight is too heavy reduce weight so that you can complete 10 reps
- Stick With It. Statistics show that about 1/2 of the people who start up an exercise program drop out within 6 months to a year. One of the biggest reasons is because people set unrealistic expectations for themselves for what they can achieve. Olympic athletes do not become Olympians overnight. It takes countless hours and repetitions to master a skill. Here are some suggestions to stick with it:
- Find a workout partner that you can hold each other accountable
- Join an exercise group
- Use a smartwatch to keep track of your workouts and output. I prefer iWatch
- Create a plan or schedule the workouts into your calendar
Sparking your brain with exercise is a simple and very effective way to keep one of the most important organs in your body fresh. Statics show that we are living longer physically due to modern medicine. Now it is our responsibility to keep our brain aging gracefully with our bodies.
Spark it up!
Steve Jordan
