Best Exercises for Brain Health, Performance & Motivation | Dr. Andrew Huberman

we are however going to talk about the Practical steps that you can take to make sure that you're getting the most brain benefits from your exercise based on what we've talked about so far as well as a broad survey of the literature and again it is a big literature here are the four things that I believe everyone should be doing every single week in terms of their exercise program I believe that everybody should include both resistance training could be body weight free weights machines some combination of those as well as cardiovascular training each week and

that the cardiovascular training should include both high-intensity interval training at least once per week and some so-called long slow distance training or zone two type training each week whatever exercise you happen to be doing or you happen to be planning I do believe it should include four things specifically to improve brain health and performance although these four things will also benefit you at the level of your bodily health no doubt the first thing is to include at least one workout per week that is of a long slow distance nature so zone two type cardio maybe

you get a little bit up into zone three but basically jogging swimming rowing any activity that you can carry out consistently for 45 to 75 minutes without getting injured right people always say well do I have to run no if you don't like running and running's too hard on your body or you'll get injured then do something else maybe you do the row maybe you ride a stationary bike maybe you ride a road bike but at least one long slow distance training session per week is going to be very beneficial for brain health because of

the way that it impacts cerebral blood flow and aial health and basically the way that cardiovascular health improves brain function the second thing is to include at least one workout per week that's of the so-called high-intensity interval training type now there are a lot of different types of high-intensity interval training out there in fact Dr Andy Galpin said says you know we'll hear about say like the 4x4x4 protocol right four minutes of going as hard as you can for 4 minutes basically where there's no variation in the intensity through that whole four minutes you're going

hard the whole four minutes but only as hard as you can for the entire four minutes then resting four minutes and then repeating that 4x4 cycle four times so that's one way to do it but Dr Andy Galpin would be the first to tell you that probably also get great results from a 3X3 by4 type of workout or a 6x6 by six type of workout and generally when one finishes that type of workout your heart rate is very very elevated now I don't tend to track my heart rate during exercise perhaps I should but I

don't like to get you know too weighed down with technology when I exercise I like to go more on feel that's just me I find that my heart rate is extremely high right as I get off that thing but you know 5 minutes later it's back to Baseline and I certainly feel energized after doing that to go do some cognitive work to shower up and to head to work that sort of thing so pick a high-intensity interval training session that you can do at least once per week and that works for you and again it's

really important to pick a form of exercise for the high-intensity interval training that you can do without getting injured this is so important you know one way to really limit your brain health and bodily health is to get injured and to not be able to exercise the third would be Tut Tu time under tension if you're doing resistance training and I do believe everybody should be doing resistance training there are a near infinite number of different ways to do resistance training as you well know you can move the weight ballistically you can control the entric

you can do any number of different things but some proportion of the exercises that you do during your resistance training during the week should include time under tension training where you're really emphasizing the contraction of the muscles the slow lowering of the weight as well as the lifting of the weight Contracting the muscles as hard as you can and this is really to emphasize the nerve to muscle Pathways in the way that time tension promotes the release of things from muscles into the bloodstream that can positively impact the brain as well as the way that

focusing your brain on exercises such that you're isolating muscles or even if you're not doing a so-called isolation exercise maybe you're doing a compound exercise like a dip or a squat or a deadlift but that really concentrating on the muscles that are supposed to be managing the work and not just moving the weight but challenging the muscles this very important thing challenging the muscles using the weight not lifting weights or moving weights by focusing on time under tension you will of course get benefits as it relates to hypertrophy and strength increases in particular hypertrophy and

time under tension training is very beneficial for the deployment of the molecules that work both within the body but also within the brain to support brain health and function both in the short term and most particularly in the long term I tend to make a full third of my resistance training just focused on time under tension so if I do two exercises is typically the first exercise is a compound exercise so if it's a shoulder press for instance I'll do a couple warm-up sets and then the work sets I try and move the weight and

generally I tend to work pretty heavy in the for me heavy for me in the four to eight repetition range I'll try and move the weight as quickly as I can on the concentric phase the lifting phase and then at least twice as slow on the lowering phase and then I pause while keeping the muscles under tension I never really set the weight down at all during a set if I'm doing my job that is and then the second exercise that I do I really focus even more on time under tension so whether or not

it's a compound exercise or an isolation exercise again compound exercise multiple joints moving isolation exercise single joints moving I'll really concentrate on keeping the muscle under tension the entire time in fact I'll lift the weight off the stack if it's a machine or if it's a free weight just a little bit engage the muscles that I'm trying to activate or train and then keep it under tension throughout the concentric the contraction and the lowering of that weight and then never actually set it down until the end of the set AKA increasing the time under tension

and then the fourth category of exercise that I believe everybody should include in their existing workouts or add if you're not currently working out is some sort of explosive jumping and or Ecentric Landing now the explosive jumping with Ecentric Landing you could do on a mat right most people won't do it on concrete because they're worried about impact that sort of thing but let's say you have some some mats or you're on a lawn or you're on dirt or you're you know jumping up onto a box as high as you can and then jumping down

and controlling the Ecentric portion again pick something that you can do safely progress slowly right if you're going to jump up and off boxes you want to start with low boxes I know that many of you can jump quite High um and I'm not one of those people but if you can jump quite high and then you're going to jump off that box and you're going to do this as a new thing you'll notice that anytime you add Ecentric training to your workout regimen it tends to increase soreness a lot and often people get injured

by including a new form of movement in particular a form of movement that you can fall and or not just falling but by including a lot of Ecentric movements that they hadn't been doing previously again be really safe about this but that loading of the skeleton through Ecentric movement and controlling The Descent super important not just for your body not just to avoid Falls not just to improve coordination and a bunch of other great things but also to get that release of osteocalcin the improvements in bdnf brain performance brain health and so on and I'm

guessing that most of you can probably incorporate these four things long slow distance high-intensity interval training some deliberate time under attention training during your resistance training again could be done with body weight doesn't have to even be done with machines or free weights as well as some explosive and Ecentric control training without adding any time to your existing workout regimen simply by incorporating it into whatever workouts you happen to already be doing and the explosive Ecentric control training could be done frankly at the end of a run you could do it at the end of

your zone two day you could do it on the end of a hit day whenever you do it and however you do it just try not to get injured that's the most important thing why well it turns out if you get injured you can't exercise sometimes you can and it's good to continue exercising provided you're not aggravating that injury but a lot of times you can't and there're actually studies of how quickly your brain starts to suffer if you don't exercise now most of these Studies have been done on very experienced athletes or people that

are exercising a lot and then are forced to detrain or stop training completely and in some of these studies they've done this independent of anything else it's not like these people got sick from a you know a cold or flu and then had to stop training they'll just have them train a lot and then stop training and then start to look at some of the effects that occur within the brain and the major thing that I was able to extract from that literature is that after about 10 days of not doing any training that is

no cardiovascular training no resistance training you start to see significant decrements in brain oxygenation levels as well as some other markers that are indicative of brain health or that would be indicative of brain health if they were to continue so if you haven't been training at all for a long period of time your brain is suffering the good news is you can start benefiting your brain very quickly by exercising okay so I listed off the four types of training that you absolutely want to include in your exercise regimen if improving your brain health and performance

is one of your goals and obviously that should be one of your goals your brain is your Central Command Center for your entire brain but also your body there's a fifth category of exercise that everyone should include if one's goal is to have a better and more resilient and indeed a better performing brain compared to your age match controls and to be direct that fifth category is the one that you absolutely don't want to do what do I mean by that well well there's an absolutely beautiful literature about a brain area I've talked a little

bit about this before in our episode about tenacity and willpower I've talked about it on a few other podcasts as well it came up during the podcast episode that I did with the one and only David gogins and that brain area is the anterior mid singulate cortex the anterior mid singulate cortex very briefly is a brain area that is powerfully engaged when we lean into challenges including physical challenges but also mental challenges emotional challenges and we get that I'm going to push through tenacity and engaging our willpower there's a category of humans referred to as

superagers superagers are people that defy the aging process at least at the level of cognition they maintain the volume of certain brain areas well into older age when their AG match counterparts are losing the same brain areas meaning people in their 60s 7s 80s '90s have brain areas that are shrinking even in cases where people don't have Alzheimer's dementia areas of the brain are shrinking superagers are people that maintain the healthy full volume of these brain areas and indeed in some cases the volume the size of these brain areas continues to increase into their later

years one of the brain areas that maintains or increases volume in these superagers is the anterior mid singulate cortex what can allow you to activate and increase the size of your anterior mid singulate cortex well it's very simple to do things that you don't want to do I should be very clear we're talking about things that can be done safely that aren't going to damage you physically or psychologically but we are talking about exercise or in some cases cognitive exercise but today we're talking about physical exercise that you would much rather not do so if

you're like me and you love resistance training it can be hard right some days I want to do it more than others and sometimes the workouts are much harder than others but I love it but if I want to maintain and increase the size of my anterior mid singulate cortex I absolutely have to find some form of physical exercise that I would much rather not do but as I mentioned before that's also safe physically and that's not going to damage me emotionally I don't know what kind of physical exercise would damage me emotionally but you

get the point so presumably most of you are doing some form of that so maybe you're doing more cardio than resistance training maybe you're doing more resistance training than cardio if you're interested in a zeroc cost program where you can you know start to sculpt out a idealized program for you but you want to start with a kind of General template we have a newsletter that you can access at hubman lab.com zero cost you don't even have to sign up to access it although if you want to sign up for the newsletter that could be

valuable to you too go to newsletter scroll down to foundational Fitness protocol it describes the program that I've been following essentially for 30 plus years and again it's about three cardiovascular training sessions per week three resistance training sessions per week the cardiovascular training ranges in time from about 12 minutes and then a longer 60 Minute session the resistance training is generally 45 to 75 minutes so on average about an hour and it might sound like a lot but when you look at that foundational Fitness protocol what you realize is that some of the workouts are

really really short some of them are a little bit longer none of them are longer than an hour so it's pretty reasonable to do and I certainly did it while working well to be frank extremely long hours for many many years so provided your sleep is intact and other areas of your life are are dialed in with stress Etc should be doable for most everybody but modify it according to what you need or if you're doing something completely different more power to you [Music]