Welcome back everybody to this week’s edition of 2-Minute Tuesdays. Now this week, we are talking to those of you who are wanting to improve the health and function of your brain. What should you be doing with your workouts that will directly increase the function of your brain and improve the health of your brain?
1) Create New Challenges For Yourself
Our first exercise tip to improve your brain health is to create new challenges for yourself while you are working out. Try new exercise, use new focus and intention while exercising, get more in tune with your body, try a new drill on the ladder – make sure you are doing new challenges or more intense challenges to keep your brain learning and improving.
Action Step: Creating new challenges does NOT mean you need to workout like a circus performer. New challenges can be created by very subtle shifts in how you are doing an exercise and do not need to put you in harm’s way by having you try to balance on a ball, for example.
Related: One Workout Away Challenge Starting October 25!
2) Get Your Muscles Contracting Harder
Our second exercise tip to improve your brain health is to get your muscles contracting harder while you workout. The harder your muscles contract and the longer your muscles contract for, the more brain-boosting benefits you will get from your exercise. While low-intensity exercise is a great way to keep yourself moving and active, in order to really boost up the health and function of your brain, get your muscles contracting harder and for longer.
Action Step: Have specific days each week when you are going to exercise more intensely, or specific parts of your daily workout when you are going to exercise more intensely. If every day is a nice and easy workout day, your brain will not have a reason to grow and adapt.
Related: The MAS At-Home Workout Program
3) Do More Than Walking
Our third exercise tip to improve your brain health is to do more than walking. Walking is a great way to stay active throughout the day, but it should not be the extent of your exercise. In order to get more of the brain-boosting benefits of exercise, it is important to do talks that are more challenging (both from a strength/endurance/effort perspective and from a coordination perspective) than walking.
Action Step: Plan to walk frequently throughout your day, but on top of that, plan to have a solid 20-60 minutes of more intense exercise every day, as well. This will help ensure that not only are you staying moving throughout the day, but you are also getting the brain-boosting benefits that come from more intense and challenging exercise.