Brain Exercise

Being a diabetic, you probably know ... especially if you follow the Beating Diabetes diet ... that regular exercise is good for you.

In fact, 30 minutes a day of exercise, like brisk walking, swimming, biking, dancing, gardening, and the like, can actively help you manage your diabetes.

The benefits of this type of moderate exercise include:

Lower blood glucose levels as you expend energy through exercise;
Improves insulin resistance to make it easier for glucose to enter muscle cells;
Reduce your weight, being overweight is one of the triggers for the onset of diabetes;
Build and tone muscles so that more glucose is used from your digestive system;
Lower the risks of heart disease and stroke that diabetes can dramatically increase;
Improve your blood circulation and deliver glucose and insulin more efficiently to where they are needed;
Reduce stress, a major aggravating factor of diabetes, and thus improve the quality of your life.
But there is another benefit that is seldom mentioned ... exercise can improve your brain function and improve your cognitive skills.
In fact, exercise is the most scientifically proven enhancer in your การออกกำลังกาย.

How exercise stimulates the brain

Exercise increases blood flow to the brain, delivering the oxygen and extra nutrients the brain needs to function. This confers a variety of benefits on the functioning of your brain, namely:

Improved executive functions
Improved focus
Increased cognitive flexibility.
Enhanced willpower
Long-term improved memory
Faster thinking
Reduced brain atrophy
Increase in new brain cells.
Reduced risk of stroke
Decreased risk of dementia and Alzheimer's disease.
Improved academic performance
[1] Improved executive functions
Executive functions are higher-level brain skills. They include things like impulse control, attention span, task and goal management, working memory capacity, etc. All the skills that are important for planning, organizing, problem solving, etc.

A study published in the US National Library of Medicine. USA (National Institutes of Health) in February 2013 The benefits of regular aerobic exercise for executive functioning in healthy populations found ample evidence that doing aerobic exercises regularly allows healthy people to optimize a variety of executive functions.

A meta-analysis (a scientific review of multiple studies) published in March 2003 in the same media as the effects of fitness on cognitive function in older adults examined the results of 18 different articles on how older people's brains look. affected by regular exercise. All study participants were healthy but led sedentary lifestyles. Physical training has been found to have strong benefits for various aspects of cognition, and executive control processes benefit the most.

[2] Improved focus

Continuous interruptions from flashing mobile phones, breaking news and emails, etc., make concentrating on a single task increasingly difficult these days. But exercise can develop our ability to ignore distractions and apply ourselves to the task at hand.

A study titled Cardiovascular Fitness, Cortical Plasticity, and Aging published in the March 2004 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences demonstrated that physically fit older people have better control over their ability to focus their attention (measured by a cognitive task hard).

[3] Greater cognitive flexibility

Cognitive flexibility is the mental ability to switch between thinking of two different concepts and thinking of multiple concepts simultaneously. It is a measure of executive function.

Aerobic exercise improves cognitive flexibility, a study published in the June 2009 issue of the US National Library of Medicine. USA (National Institutes of Health), demonstrated that regular aerobic exercise substantially improves this enviable ability.

Subjects were 91 healthy adults who were divided into three groups. For 10 weeks, one group performed minimal aerobic exercises (<2 days a week), another group performed moderate exercises (3-4 days a week), and the third group participated in high aerobic exercises (5-7 days a week). ).