Physical exercises help improve memory, study shows; see which

It’s no secret that regular exercise has many benefits. They protect against the development of chronic conditions such as diabetes and heart disease and, in some cases, can improve mental health.

But what effect do they have on specific functions, like memory? Can an exercise regimen help you remember last night’s game scores, where did you go on your first date with your girlfriend (or boyfriend) or where did you leave your keys?

It’s possible. Studies over the years have suggested that a single workout can improve memory and that regular practice over years or decades not only improves memory but also helps to fortify against future problems.

Now, a recent study from Dartmouth College (USA) focuses on how exercise intensity, over a period of time, can play an important role in enhancing different types of memory.

“We know exercise works, but we don’t know which exercise variables make it most effective,” said Marc Roig, a professor of physical therapy and occupational therapy at McGill University, who studies the effect of exercise on cognition and was not involved in the study. “We believe intensity is one of those factors.”

Exercise intensity appears to affect memory

One of the main challenges in studying the link between regular exercise and memory is that changes are difficult to measure. This is complicated by the fact that many other factors affect memory, such as working a sedentary job or experiencing chronic sleep deprivation.

Also, there are different types of memory, which explains how a person can constantly lose their keys (bad spatial memory) but have a knack for remembering birth dates (strong semantic memory).

Activity tracker watches can offer a solution to these problems. In a recent paper published in the journal Nature Scientific Reports, researchers were able to analyze a year’s worth of data from Fitbit trackers from 113 people, who also completed a series of memory tests, such as remembering story details, spatial details, foreign language terms and random word lists.

The advantage of this method is that it linked a whole year’s worth of information from participants’ activity patterns — how much exercise they did, how intense, how often — to their performance on memory tests.

Other studies have tracked patterns of activity through self-reported data, which is often less reliable than tracker data, as people tend to underestimate how much time they spend standing still and incorrectly remember their total activity levels.

“You can get a much more detailed picture with the activity tracker data,” said Jeremy Manning, a professor at Dartmouth College and one of the study’s authors.

Manning and his colleagues found that active people had better overall memory compared to sedentary people, but they also found that the types of tests they did well on varied depending on how hard they exercised.

For example, participants who engaged in light to moderate activities, such as regular walks, had better “episodic” memory. Think of episodic memory as “mental time travel,” Manning said, or the ability to remember details about everyday events, like meeting a friend at a cafe or waiting for the school bus on the first day of school.

This ties in with several previous studies that have shown that the more active people are, the better, on average, their episodic memory is.

Participants who regularly exercised with more intensity — such as running or doing a HIIT workout (high-intensity interval training) — were more likely to perform better on spatial memory tasks.

Spatial memory is the ability to remember physical relationships between objects or locations in space, such as where you placed your keys. This mirrors several other studies that show that high-intensity exercise improves memory, but goes further, suggesting that it may be more helpful for this type of memory than another.

More studies need to be done to solidify these associations and determine what is causing them, the researchers said.

“The more we can connect everyday activity patterns to cognitive performance, the closer we are to thinking about lifestyle,” which includes how active you are throughout the day and sleep patterns, said Michelle Voss, a cognitive neuroscientist at University of Iowa, which was not involved in the study.

According to Phillip Tomporowski, a professor of kinesiology at the University of Georgia, who was also not involved in the study, this work is a “very good first guess” about how certain exercise patterns affect certain types of memory.

Manning and his colleagues hope to continue with controlled experiments to identify why certain exercises can affect specific types of memory.

Maybe someday there will be a workout to finally help you remember where you put your keys.

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves