While we know aging is inevitable, new scientific research suggests there’s a method that can help you stay thriving, no matter what your age.
The method combines physical exercise with brain exercise, with researchers stressing that the combination could be the key to staying fit, both physically and mentally, as we age.
Researchers from the University of Extremadura in Spain and the University of Birmingham in the UK have found that a new training approach called Brain Endurance Training (BET) appears to be able to significantly improve both cognitive and physical performance in adults of older age.
Published in the journal Psychology of Sport & Exercise, the study (“Brain endurance training improves sedentary older adults’ cognitive and physical performance when fresh and fatigued“) claims that BET not only improves participants’ performance at the start (when they still have energy) but also helps them maintain high levels of performance even when they are tired.
What did the BET fitness survey show?
For the research, the study authors looked at 24 healthy, sedentary women between the ages of 65 and 78. These women were randomly divided into three groups: one group underwent BET, another group did only physical exercise training, and a control group did no exercise at all.
The BET group and the exercise-only group followed the same physical training program: three 45-minute sessions per week for eight weeks. Each session consisted of 20 minutes of resistance exercises (such as sit-ups) and 25 minutes of walking. The key difference was that the BET group also performed a 20-minute cognitive task before each exercise session.
To test the effectiveness of the exercise, the researchers assessed the participants’ cognitive and physical performance at four points: before the program began, at the halfway point of the eight weeks, immediately after the program ended, and four weeks after its completion. program.
Cognitive tests included a psychomotor vigilance task, which measures reaction time and alertness, and a Stroop test, which assesses the ability to override automatic responses, a key aspect of cognitive control. Physical tests included a six-minute walk test, a 30-second test where participants repeatedly sat and stood up from their position (chair test), and a 30-second arm flexion test.
These tests were administered twice during each assessment: Once when participants were “fresh” and again after they had completed a mentally demanding 30-minute cognitive task. This allowed the researchers to assess how well the different approaches helped the participants maintain their performance even when they were mentally fatigued.
Better cognitive and physical performance
The results revealed that both the BET exercise group and the exercise-only group showed improvements in cognitive and physical performance compared to the control group. However, the BET group consistently outperformed the exercise-only group, especially when participants were in a fatigued state.
For example, from the beginning to the end of the study, the BET group improved their chair test performance by 59.4% even with fatigue, compared to the improvement in the physical exercise group (47.5%). In the cognitive tasks, the BET group showed a 12.1% improvement in accuracy on the Stroop test with fatigue while the exercise group improved by 6.9%.
“We saw that BET could be an effective intervention to improve cognitive and physical performance in older adults, even when they are fatigued,” the researchers said. “This could have significant effects on improving health longevity in this population, including reducing the risk of falls and accidents.”
