Dr. Tommy Wood

speaker

1,133 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 20 Jul

Dr. Tommy Wood’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Huberman Lab · Accelerate Learning & Increase Cognitive Capacity | Dr. Tommy Wood · 20 Jul 2026 podcast

Which obviously increases alertness and arousal and can in the short term make you feel good.

It's a good thing, yeah.

You see similar effects of, you know, short resistance training workouts.

I think of it, it's probably a little bit of like an area under the curve thing because you see some similar effects of like you go out and you do,

six second really hard sprints like max effort sprints you do that a few times with a long break in between right that seems to have a similar effect but you're only working for very short periods with very long rest periods so it's some it's something in that in that sphere and i think it's that's probably just it it's just enough to you know just kind of boost categories a little bit a little bit of cortisol that's enough to kind of move you up the arousal curve to the point where you're then able to focus and engage a little bit better i think

Yeah, you don't need a huge dump of that in order to achieve that increase in arousal, particularly as it pertains to learning and then cognitive performance in formal cognitive tests, which is where this is usually done.

If you're then thinking about the type of exercise that changes cognitive function or brain structure long term,

effort and intensity do seem to matter a lot more but those studies have looked less at well how did that how do they feel directly afterwards right now you're thinking about what's the kind of stimulus that drives change over time and then intensity matters a lot as well so um

that the best example um is with aerobic exercise on the kind of uh zone two up to kind of zone four five sprint spectrum so most people who listen to your show are probably familiar with a study where in older adults they had them do brisk walking three times a week 40 minutes um

And when you kind of read the study and the heart rate levels they were trying to attain, it was basically zone two work.

40 minutes, brisk walking, three times a week for a year.

And they saw significant increases in the volume of the hippocampus, increases in VO2 max, fitness, increases in circulating BDNF levels.

though circulating BDNF doesn't actually get into the brain, but it's kind of telling you something about probably BDNF that's being produced in the brain and improvements in memory with all of that.

However, there's a much more recent study that took again older adults and randomized them across three different groups.

One was like a low intensity group.

Another group basically did kind of zone two type work on a treadmill three times a week, very similar to that previous study that I mentioned.

And the third group did a high intensity interval training intervention, which was the Norwegian four by four protocol.

So four minutes, 85 to 95% of maximum heart rate.

They had a three minute rest in their protocol.

They did that four times over.

Showing 681–700 of 1,133 · page 35 of 57