Luke O'Neill

And again, even better, and as anybody who listens to the podcast will know, I like mechanism, like what's really going on here.

It turns out that that part of the brain, the VMH, was tied into glucose storage.

So when you trigger that part of the brain through exercise, your body's able to store more glucose in the form of glycogen, which I will come back to when I come to the marathon part.

And that meant you'd better sort of stores in reserve.

And that meant you were more able to run longer the next time.

that durability, endurance type thing, was happening because you're basically giving yourself more fuel inside your body.

So again, it sounds a bit complicated, I know, but the VMH was allowing you to lay down stores and then you exercise the next time and now you have a battery already charged, as it were, and you can run for longer.

That's quite a good analogy.

I just thought of it now, actually, but that's the idea.

Basically, this VMH part of your brain charges up your battery and then off you go the next time and the battery runs away and you can keep running forever or whatever it is, or run for longer anyway.

And you're building up that endurance and the endurance, especially in the muscles, they noticed the lungs and the heart were a bit better.

And obviously this must have kind of evolved.

When you do exercise and you get a bit fitter, you will be fitter next time.

And your body kind of remembers, as it were,

the exercise you did, and the next time you're even better.

And you can see how evolution would have selected out that endurance aspect to exercise.

Now, what I like about this study is it might help us in the future because they're now talking about activating the VMH, say with an electrode.

And obviously this is a bit speculative and very experimental.

But imagine if you could trigger that part of the brain now in someone who's recovering from an injury, say,

Or maybe someone has had a stroke and can't get the endurance back.