Huberman Lab
How to Use Exercise to Improve Your Brain’s Health, Longevity & Performance
06 Jan 2025
Full Episode
Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.
Today, we are discussing exercise and brain health, which includes brain longevity and brain performance, our ability to learn new information over long periods of time and indeed into old age. Today, we are going to discuss how different forms of exercise,
resistance training, cardiovascular training of both long, medium and short duration can be used to improve the way that your brain functions acutely, meaning immediately in the minutes and hours and the day that you do that exercise, as well as in the long term, in the days, weeks and months after you perform that exercise. And of course,
if you're exercising regularly, the effects of exercise on brain health and performance compound over time, making you better able to learn things, better able to retain information from the past, and indeed to expand your brain's capacity to learn new types of information in new ways.
In researching today's episode, I quickly came to realize that the number of studies that have explored the relationship between exercise, brain performance, and brain health as well as the range of different types of exercise that have been explored in that context is extremely vast.
There are literally tens of thousands of studies on this topic, as well as meta analyses and reviews, all of which point to positive effects of doing exercise of various types on brain health and performance. Within those many, many studies, you'll find many, many different exercise protocols that lead to improvements in brain performance and longevity.
So the goal of today's episode is to synthesize that vast amount of information into a logical framework that simplifies it and clarifies it and places it within the context of specific mechanisms, both neurobiological mechanisms and endocrine-based mechanisms that together
can very well explain the data on how exercise impacts brain health and longevity, such that by the end of today's episode, you'll have both some specific recommendations about how to use exercise for sake of brain health and performance that I believe will be new to most of you, as well as the ability to think about the mechanisms and the logical framework that wraps around this incredibly large literature on exercise and brain performance so that you can customize your exercise program on the basis of how much time you have available,
your specific age, your health status, and the specific types of brain changes that you might be seeking through the use of exercise.
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