To understand the injustice that has been
done to exercise, let’s pretend we’re back in 1995 and Nintendo is advertising the
Nintendo 64. When marketing, they talk solely about the
technical aspects of the machine and how it has a 93.7 megahertz processor compared to
the Super Nintendo’s measly 3.56 megahertz processor. The N64 flops and the entire marketing team
is fired since they failed to promote any relevant information like the actual nature
of the new games or even that an entire D was added, making the games 3D instead of
2D. Of course in reality, the Nintendo 64 did
quite well. This hypothetical marketing strategy is just
a parallel to the poor marketing strategy for exercise. The sales points of exercise up until now
were that it’s good for the heart and it will make you lose weight. First off, while these are good benefits,
they’re not nearly as compelling as the other benefits of exercise. “Good for the heart” is a vague notion
that’s encouraging only if you happen to be older and worried about a heart attack. Then, data is showing that exercise isn’t
even that effective for losing weight. A review of exercise intervention studies
published in 2001 by Queen’s University in Canada found that after 20 weeks, "the
amount of exercise energy expenditure had no correlation with weight loss" I’m not saying that exercise doesn’t affect
your body. The right kind of exercise increases muscle
mass and improves your insulin sensitivity, setting you up to have a healthier body composition. However, if you begin exercising without managing
other factors like diet, you may be very discouraged by poor weight loss results. “Does exercise work? So, here are studies of exercise - as you
can see when compared with no treatment, exercise resulted in very small weight loss across
the board. Exercise does not cause weight loss. What does exercise do? It causes muscle gain. Muscle have mitochondria, mitochondria burn
energy. So, exercise is the single best thing you
can do for yourself, but if you think it’s gonna show up on the scale, think again.” In a September 2016 issue of TIME magazine,
Dr. Mark Tarnopolsky said that “If there were a drug that could do for human health
everything that exercise can, it would likely be the most valuable pharmaceutical ever developed.” To understand what makes exercise so great,
we need to understand how it affects the brain. First off, what is the brain for? Some may say “we have brains to think! To create art and to come up with creative
solutions to complex problems!” but Neuroscientist Daniel Wolpert argues that is not the case. “ We have a brain for one reason and one
reason only and that’s to produce adaptable and complex movement. There is no other reason to have a brain.” To illustrate this, Daniel uses the example
of a sea squirt. Early in its life, the sea squirt has a nervous
system. It will use this nervous system to move around
and find a suitable rock to attach itself to, then it will spend the rest of its life
there. At that point, movement is no longer a necessity
for survival, so the very first thing the sea squirt does is it digests its brain for
energy. A more relatable example is the Koala. The Koala has adapted its digestive system
to derive all the energy it needs from eucalyptus leaves. It really doesn’t need to move that much
as it can just sit in the tree, eat, and watch the world go by. Earlier in the Koala’s evolution, it used
to have a much bigger brain. However, once its diet became less diverse
and required less movement to survive, its brain shrunk. Less movement meant less brain was necessary. From an evolutionary perspective, it’s the
same as not wasting your money on a 4000 dollar laptop if all you need to do is run some simple
software like your web browser and email client. What research on exercise is suggesting, and
a better understanding of neurochemical mechanisms is proving, is that there is a very powerful
connection between the brain and movement. A big brain is necessary to facilitate complex
movements, and executing such movements and getting your heart rate up bolsters your brain
power. Exercise has been shown to help people learn
much more efficiently, better deal with stress, and drastically reduce anxiety. It improves mood to the point of lifting people
people out of depression, and it strengthens focus to the point that some ADHD patients
elect to throw out their prescriptions. And that’s not even the full list. The California Department of Education has
consistently shown that students with higher fitness scores have higher test scores. Former President Ma of Taiwan increased the
occurrence of Physical Education in schools nationwide from twice a week to three times
a week for this reason. The minister of education, science and technology
in South Korea extended the school day by 1 hour to add more time for PE and sports. This decision was made after reading Dr. John
Ratey’s book “SPARK” which is all about the brain benefits of exercising. The reason the Taiwanese and South Korean
school systems don’t just have students study for another hour is because exercise
actually primes the brain to learn faster. A 2007 study showed that subjects who did
high intensity exercise beforehand could learn vocabulary words 20% faster than those who
remained sedentary. The key to this phenomenon is a protein called
Brain Derived Neurotrophic Factor, or BDNF for short. In order to learn something, the brain actually
needs to grow and modify its cellular infrastructure to allow neurons to fire more easily. Researchers found that “if they sprinkled
BDNF onto neurons in a petri dish, the cells automatically sprouted new branches, producing
the same structural growth required for learning.” This impressive result had John Ratey nickname
BDNF the “Miracle-Gro for the brain.” “BDNF improves the function of neurons,
encourages their growth, and strengthens and protects them against the natural process
of cell death. ...BDNF is a crucial biological link between
thought, emotions and movement.” A 2013 study in the journal of sports science
and medicine showed that just 20 to 40 minutes of aerobic exercise increased BDNF in the
blood by 32%. Rather than stocking up on coffee before you
sit down to study, you might want to try jogging around the block instead. One way to understand why exercise would trigger
your brain to initiate “learning mode” like this is to think of your body as the
world’s most intricate “IF THEN” system. Your body has triggers for almost every physiological
process. For example, IF cold THEN shiver. IF hot THEN sweat. Most of your body’s physiological expressions
can’t be induced just by force of will, certain triggers must be present. [“Alexa, increase my testosterone by 50%.” “I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t
do that.” ] By understanding which physiological triggers
influence which physiological expressions, we can start getting our brains to do what
we want. The reason exercise is a key trigger for all
kinds of positive effects in the brain, particularly learning, is because movement signals to the
brain that something important is happening. Maybe not in modern times, but originally,
when we were moving, it was for the sake of survival. You move to escape a predator, to forage for
food, to hunt, et cetera. While moving, it’s in your best interest
to learn the lay of the land so you don’t get lost and can locate forageable food again. You had better remember how an attacking animal
moves and what path was most efficient to escape so you can prevent yourself from becoming
a carcass next time. When you’re loafing around, you’re not
convincing your brain that learning is necessary. From your brain’s perspective, being sedentary
means you’re safe, nothing important is happening, and it’s time to rest. When you think of Arnold Schwarzenegger, you
might not associate him with intelligence. You might say he talks funny, and that his
success only comes from him being a novelty when musclebound guys were rare. However, no matter how much attention your
arms get you, you’ll need a lot of motivation, learning capacity, and focus to become a bodybuilder,
businessman, actor, investor, and politician. By the way it wasn’t his physique that made
him rich, he became a millionaire through real estate before he even began acting. Oh and all this while he was speaking in his
second language. There’s a good chance that Arnold can thank
his fitness for such an impressive display of focus and motivation. We owe our motivations and entire ‘will
to live’ to the brain’s reward center. With almost any activity we choose to do,
we do it because we expect some sort of reward. We strive for success in life because we expect
the reward of fulfillment, we eat candy bars for the rewarding taste and we do taxes for
the reward of not getting audited by the IRS. Without reward, our brains don’t have much
reason to do anything. An anti-obesity drug called Rimonabant was
a tragic example of this. Rimonabant is an endocannabinoid antagonist-
it’s an “anti-marijuana” medicine, which also means it’s “anti-munchies” medicine. It gets you to stop eating by inhibiting the
sense of reward from food, and unfortunately everything else. 20 percent of users experienced serious depression
and there were several suicides. Kill the reward system and you just might
want to kill yourself. Dopamine is a key player in the reward center. Dopamine is all about motivation and attention,
and is responsible for that feeling of satisfaction when we accomplish something. It makes you want to do things, and reassures
you that that thing was worth doing. So if your dopamine is not working properly,
you can find it hard to get things done, because you’re not getting enough fulfillment to
justify doing them. One of the ways the ADHD drug adderall works
is by mimicking the action of dopamine in the reward center of the brain. Adderall users can get so focused on mundane
tasks and blast through their to-do lists because everything becomes interesting. But you don’t have to go the pharmacy to
get your reward center going. Studies show that exercise boosts motivation
by increasing dopamine storage and triggering the creation of dopamine receptors in the
reward center. Exercise won’t have you staying up all night
in a studying frenzy like adderall, but it will give you more willpower and focus to
do those little things that don’t usually feel rewarding. Aside from its positive effects on dopamine,
exercise also elevates levels of norepinephrine and serotonin. When these three neurotransmitters are in
deficit, people become depressed. In a 1999 study, James Blumenthal compared
exercise to the anti-depressant Zoloft in a 16 week trial. They found that just thirty minutes of jogging,
three times a week was just as effective as Zoloft. But that’s only looking at depression. A 2006 study of over 19,000 Dutch twins and
their families showed that exercisers were less depressed, less anxious, more socially
outgoing and less neurotic. I guess it wasn’t hyperbole when Dr. Mark
Tarnopolsky said that if exercise were a drug, it would be the most valuable one ever developed. The last point about exercise and the brain
has to do with stress. Let’s take a look at the original stress
scenario: You’re chilling out eating berries or whatever and then you see a tiger advancing
towards you. Your fight or flight response switches on,
the pituitary gland secretes adrenocorticotropic hormone, cortisol is released, your heart
rate shoots up, your digestion turns off and you really start moving. You will exert an immense amount of effort,
after a couple minutes you will come to rest, then your physiological processes will calm
down, and your cortisol will quickly drop and stay down for the rest of the day. This is another example of the body’s IF
THEN sequencing: IF See tiger, THEN jack up cortisol. After that, it becomes: IF You have exerted
sufficient effort THEN lower cortisol levels. Unfortunately for most people they activate
the first part of this a lot, but they don’t activate the second part. Which means for most of the day, you’re
sitting around with a bunch of cortisol in your system. We’ve heard that stress makes you fat, and
indeed it does. Research shows that cortisol specifically
increases the accumulation visceral fat, which is linked to cardiovascular disease and metabolic
syndrome. But there’s a much more important area affected
by stress. Brain imaging has shown that people with frequently
high cortisol levels degrade their brain tissue much faster than normal. As cortisol rises, electrical signals in your
hippocampus deteriorate. The hippocampus is associated with learning,
memories, and of course stress control. However, by exercising in the morning, you
can dial down your cortisol levels and keep them down the rest of the day. Frequent exercise allows your body to become
much better at reacting to stress. I mentioned that exercise is as good as medication
for treating some issues, but exercise isn’t just for correcting health. Even if you are confident that you feel great,
have good focus, and you are happy with your ability to learn new things, you could still
improve all of these areas. If you’ve replaced say your headphones recently,
you probably were satisfied with the ones you had... until you tried better ones and
thought “Whoa! I could have been hearing in high quality
this whole time!” Then those new headphones become your new
standard. If you later put on your old headphones, you
think “God these sound like crap.” Starting an exercise routine feels like putting
on those new headphones. When someone mentions they don’t have time
for 20 minutes of exercise in the morning, it reminds me of one of my favorite Brian
Regan skits about eyeglasses: “How can instantly improved vision not be
at the top of your to do list? ‘Ah I’ll see tomorrow. I don’t- I don’t have time! I don’t have time. To see clearly. No. ” Sometime about two years ago, I was dissatisfied
with my productivity and thought I had a touch of ADHD, so I got a prescription for modafinil. Modafinil has been compared to the magical
productivity pill NZT in the movie “limitless”. Some users said colors look brighter and that
they instantly felt “switched on.” For me, not so much. There was never a particularly striking contrast
in how I felt on modafinil, just at some point during the day, I would look back and think
“Wow I really got a lot done today.” I stopped taking modafinil after just a few
weeks of trying it as I didn’t like the idea of relying on something for productivity. Now that I’ve finally made a habit of consistently
exercising first thing every morning, I have a lot of those moments where I look back and
say “Wow I really got a lot done.” But, any time I skip the exercise, it feels
like I’ve put my shitty old headphones back on.
If working out makes you less depressed then I'd hate to see what I'd be like if I didn't go the gym 4+ times a week
I hate it when a tiger comes after me while I'm chilling out eating berries or whatever.
I just saw this posted somewhere “Exercise is a CELEBRATION of what you can do not a punishment for what you ate”
I know this didn't get a lot of recognition here, but I guess that allows me to open a conversation about this on this thread. I have been dealing with pretty severe anxiety for just over a year now, which is a scary thought in itself. I have gone through the motions of dealing with chest pains, heart palpitations, shortness of breath, the whole thing. I just recently got prescribed anti-depressants (prozac) and after sitting on the pills for a little and doing some research I decided to flush them. I started taking CBD oils as a supplement, hearing all of the great things about them and it definitely has done its part in improving my lifestyle, but I still often go tired throughout the day and feel like I am often irritable and overall unhealthy. I feel like I don't eat superbly or drink water enough and barely exercise. I am definitely not overweight, just not motivated to hit the gym or do any sort of body maintenance because I always make the excuse that I have law school applications to worry about or general school work to do and can't find the time. I just feel like i'm at the point right now where I feel like I need to make some sort of life change in order to feel good.
After watching this video, I really feel like just going and exercising might be the root of a lot of my mental health challenges and my overall sense of well-being. I know that once I start getting into a routine I will find motivation to continue on, but I truthfully never considered the true power of exercise and keeping the body and mind healthy. I know this may sound like an obvious fix, but the point i'm trying to make is that I, like possibly many other people in the world and even reading this, simply haven't found the motivation to take care of myself. As simple as it is in theory, I just prefer to sit inside and try and force myself to do homework or watch some reddit videos. But underlyingly, there are issues with my health and body overall that I deal with while doing my daily "sitting and watching reddit videos" that i'm trying to fix through CBD pills or almost being convinced to start on anti-depressants. The answer is seemingly right in front of me.
This guy mentions the cortisol being stagnant in your system all day, causing stress and depression. It makes absolute perfect sense. I haven't been taking care of myself for a while. Lacking on drinking water, lacking on eating healthily, lacking on going on runs and hitting the gym. All of a sudden, I start developing anxiety, feeling like shit all day, dealing with irritability and trouble sleeping. After seeing the correlation between exercise and overall health improvement, I am genuinely going to make it a point that starting as soon as I wake up tomorrow, i'm going to go on a god damn run before class, go to all of my classes, fill up my water bottle, eat a good, healthy breakfast, and knock out my day. I'm going to stay away from sugary drinks, i'm going to stay away from greasy foods, i'm gonna commit to a workout regiment, no matter how small.
I guess today was the day that I was gonna vent about how my overall health feels, and vow to take some steps towards making my life better. I don't mean to sound corny or sarcastic at all. I feel like God has been pushing me to make a change in my life and I feel like that is only going to be possible when I begin to take care of my health. I hope anyone reading this that finds similar inspiration can find it within them to pursue it. I haven't done something like this in my life in a long time and it is long overdue. I have a lot to look forward to and I need to start taking care of my body and mind. Thank you for posting this and allowing me to find a potential solution to some of the problems I have faced in my own little world in the last year. I hope you found similar inspiration as well.
The message is correct, but the video is filled with problematic conclusions based on statistical fallacies. To pick just one, it references over and over how people who exercise perform better at various tasks ("the California Dept. of Education has shown consistently that students with higher fitness scores have higher test scores"), but it fails to demonstrate a causal relationship between the two things.
It could simply be that people who tend to exercise are more detail oriented, or dedicated, or are simply more likely to be smarter, than those who do not. It could be a secondary cause, such as depression and/or anxiety, which are ameliorated by exercise, but not exercise itself being the cause (in other words, someone without those conditions would not be benefited, or not as much).
This is a huge problem with many pop-sci videos. Correlation is not causation. While I agree that exercise has huge benefits in many ways, this video is not convincing to that effect.
This youtube channel is not a good source of information. A lot of the videos (including this one) is just misinterpreted data and science. The person who runs it doesn't really know what they're talking about.
So wait, why do I feel like trash after exercising? There's all this phlegm in my throat and it's rough to breath and I feel lethargic. It may seem dramatic but it feels like I'm getting gaslighted over here.
I discovered this video 2 years ago and it made me get a gym membership. The difference in my life pre and post that moment is extraordinary
Why I Run - Exurb1a