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Physical Fitness and Brain Fitness Tap Into Same Fuel Reserve For Energy!

For years, the brain fitness community has compared mental exercise training to physical fitness training by saying that working your brain rigorously causes it to react the way muscle reacts when consistently challenged, strategically, using weight resistance. Recent findings by researchers in Denmark and The Netherlands confirm that the comparison is even more accurate than first believed.

Just as physical muscle grows, becomes stronger, gains greater endurance, and acquires increased flexibility through weight training; your brain gains enhanced mental strength, stamina, and practical intelligence in response to mental exercise training techniques that meet certain criteria

The faculty of attention has been compared to gymnasium weights, while mental concentration has been compared to the muscle that flexes to manipulate the weights. Intentional, time-consuming effort at controlling attention burns a great deal of energy in the way holding a heavy weight out before your body burns plenty, also. One recent study even proved that mental exertion can even cause a decline in physical output.

Until recently, the main assumption was that the brain, when exerting itself vigorously, burned glucose as its main fuel. Now, however, research shows that the brain can and does burn the very same lactate produced by muscular exertion in order to deal with higher energy demands in the short term. In the brain, lactate apparently serves as an alternative fuel to glucose – perhaps a back up booster, so to speak, and fuel reserve that keeps the brain’s tank from running dry during extended and high levels of demand when the body’s glucose is being allocated to the muscles.

The research has not progressed to the point of learning how much cognitive exertion is necessary before the brain taps into the reserve tank without the accompaniment of hard exercise, but data shows that during heavy physical exercise, the brain itself actually goes into high gear and removes lactate from the blood stream, allowing the muscles to burn glucose, which they need to accomplish their strenuous task.

This creates much interest in finding out how lactate affects the brain from a neurological standpoint. Is there any way to confirm that the brain burns lactate directly, rather than converts it? Does lactate improve cognitive functioning? When the brain is burning lactate during physical exercise, and is kicked into high gear, how does that affect cognitive performance during and immediately afterward? How long does the effect, if any, last? What is its effect on brain cell health and growth? Is there any connection between lactate and neurogenesis, which is the process of new brain cell creation in response to new learning? These questions are certain to be answered in scientific studies over the next couple years and will significantly add to our knowledge of how strenuous exercise affects short term and long-term brain fitness.