The energy blog
For many people the idea of getting up on a cold morning and going for a jog does not have positive connotations of energy and vitality. In fact exercising is associated with feelings of pain, discomfort, obligation and inconvenience. Yes exercise uses energy, yes you can be physically exhausted through exercising, but using energy through certain types of exercise actually gives you more energy in return; more energy than a cup of coffee, a rest, an energy bar or any of these in combination. Sounds unbelievable?
Here’s how…
When you exercise your muscles have a demand of energy, so they start to tap your reserves, fueling the muscles to help them become active. This fuelling process has a number of effects:
1) Is a temperature increase. The temperature increase gives a positive sensation in the body, warming joints and making you feel more energetic. On a scientific level the increase in temperature actually aids the bodies processes and the chemical reactions that occur. Creating a more optimal environment for the enzymes, helping you to produce more energy.
2) The increase in circulation through warming and increased heart rate enables you to get more oxygen around the body oxygenating the extremities. This is a significant point, with more O2 pumping round as a result of your increased breathing and heart rate you increase your rate of aerobic energy production. Without getting too technical on this, the more O2 available, the more ATP you will produce. Essentially ATP is the unit you need to convert a muscle into action. Lots of ATP synthesis = lots of energy.
This oxygentation and increased blood flow at a muscular level helps movement but at other levels, it helps organ function, including the brain, which as a result receives more nutrients leaving you sharper.
3) At a neurological level exercise increases the production of BDNF often also referred to as miracle grow for the brain. This magical stuff increases the amount and size of nerve connections in the brain. This increase, increases your cognitive abilities and encourages learning. Exercise encourages the recovery process in the brain making the energy production process more efficient and decreasing the cellular stress involved with producing energy.
4) The release of endorphins through exercise has stress and depression decreasing qualities. Endorphins are like a natural pain killer that cam provide a natural high. This elevated mood gives you the sensation of vitality and energy even if prior to exercising you felt like all the day had install for you was pain.
5) If you exercise to a point where lactic acid is produced, which is the point where the demand for O2 in the muscle actually exceeds the amount you can get to it. The recovery process is that your body starts to mop up the lactic acid and convert it back to fuel. More fuel equals more energy.
The great thing about the first four points on this list is very little exercise is actually needed. Try this and get back to me. Start walking each morning, walk for just 10 minutes in any direction away from your house, turn around and walk back again, simple! I guarantee you will have as much as 60% more energy.
The cost of energy (June 7)
You may remember the day when you jumped out of bed, felt fantastic, no aches no pains, couldn’t wait to crack on with whatever the day had install.
Now if this was yesterday, great pat yourself on the back, gloat that you are the minority and turn off the computer you have no need to be reading this post. On the other hand, if you are unsure that an energized day like the one described has ever existed for you and if it did, you worry that it may have been a delusion, because around the same time period you were still hanging out for the Tooth Fairy and Father Christmas, well read on, you are not alone.
You can organise your life, batch your work, quadrant your thinking, purchase a treadmill for every room of the house and shop for nothing other than carrots at the supermarket but, if you don’t have enough energy to drag yourself off of the couch then quite simply, you won’t.
In fact, working with people one on one as a health expert I hear ‘lack of energy’ as the most persistent offender, followed by ‘I feel lethargic’ ‘I can’t think properly’, ‘I feel tired all the time’ and ‘I just feel like crap’.
If you are feeling like a siesta is a good idea then some of these simple energy boosting tips might help you:
1) Exercise. Yes exercise. Exercise has been proven to increase your energy levels, even for people that are suffering with some serious illnesses. Lactic acid (the stuff that burns during exercise) is even reprocessed as fuel helping to produce energy. \
2) Cut out caffeine after mid-day. Relying on a a caffeine hit in the afternoon is like trying to sprint a marathon. You will be ahead for awhile, but you will crash and everyone else will stroll past you.
3) Keep your blood sugar constant. Avoid heavily sugared foods. The resulting spike of insulin will soon see your energy dip below optimum levels.
4) Drink water and lots of it, then a little more.
5) Learn to dance and structure your day. Take planned breaks regularly. Your body works in rhythms, if you don’t plan in some highs and lows you will experience them anyway, but when you don’t want them.
6) Keep stress levels at bay. When your body is under stress you are emotionally frazzling your circuits. Stay positive and stay calm.
7) Sleep for at least 7 hours.
Implementing the above seems simple enough, although in reality they can be some of the hardest things for people to grasp. I will break down each point in detail in future posts and help you implement one point at a time boosting your energy – weekly!
Exercise your IQ (Feb 09)
So can exercise actually make you more intelligent? Well yes in some ways it can, and not just because it is an intelligent thing to do.
Recent research looking into the affect certain exercise has on the brain and subsequently cognitive processing, has provided some astonishing results. The research focuses on examining the feeling of wellbeing that a person has following aerobic exercise and unfolding exactly what is going on in the brain and body at the time. Essentially this is a development of the endorphin theory that most people have become aware of.
Sometime ago I had the realisation that separating mind and body was an academic thing to do which actually made little sense in reality. It is useful to view them as separate parts when describing them or when learning about their components or function for simplicity sake, but to actually consider mind and body as individual and dissimilar moving parts of a person, seems naïve. To me the mind, a thought, is just as much a physical action as flexing a bicep, which is either a simplistic notion, or a complex one, depending on what you consider ‘physical’ to be.
So with this in mind training the body, becoming physically fit, would obviously strengthen a persons thinking and their ability to deal with daily tasks of comprehension as your body, including mind becomes ‘fitter’ or more ‘efficient’. When I looked into this concept further I discovered a study that has recently been conducted in the US, that draws on years of other studies, that supports the notion of exercise actually making you smarter. In this study in particular a group of high school children were tested against their peers from other schools in a standard ability test, looking at the core subjects of English, Maths and Science. The schools results were recorded as being middle of the road and unexceptional, to be expected of a middle tier school with a mix of students. Anyway the school then developed and implemented a revolutionary PE program involving exercise every morning at what they called ‘zero hour’. So before anything else each morning all the students would do PE. Now this wasn’t PE class as you may remember, there was no learning of sports rules or playing of team sports, this was purely exercise aimed at improving the students fitness and teaching them how to train and stay physically fit. The students, fitted with heart rate monitors, would run round the athletics track or cycle, skip for at least 30 minutes within pre-determined heart rate zones (65-80% max heart rate). The students completed this exercise everyday.
When the school completed the standard ability test in English, maths and science a second time after a number of months training they ranked significantly better, in fact they ranked amongst some of the best schools internationally, some schools with high fees that had a history of high achieving students from wealthy backgrounds, not just in the US but also in places like Singapore where students are considered to be of a high standard. The students from the school were also fitness tested and showed huge improvements in their physical fitness since the beginning of the program as a result of the zero hour PE. Teachers also reported that their students particularly in the lesson immediately after the PE sessions were, better behaved, more responsive and were able to focus better than before the program and better than the students attending the lessons in the last hour of the day. Now for all you sceptics out there with analytical brains, I know there are a number of variables, I know that you could write an article on the limitations of such a study and I’m sure you are interested to know how they controlled their tests to get a meaningful result. In my mind the fact is the students performed better second time round and were physically fitter and the teachers found them easier to manage, that is significant enough for me. For more explanation look up the work by John J. Ratey MD and find out for yourself.
The Science
How can this be, is it simply because of the endorphins and feel good factor associated with exercise? Well yes but there is more.
The brain is made up of billions of neurons that pass information via a number of chemicals. The important point to understand is the communication parts do not actually touch, in fact there are gaps known as synapses. The way it happens is an electrical signal fires down the signalling branch to the gap (synapse) where chemicals (neurotransmitters) carry a signal across to the receiving branch (the dendrite). If that receiving signal reaches a certain level it triggers the receiving branch to fire another signal down its branch and the whole process continues. If a signal has never been passed between two particular neurons before, when it actually does, it primes the communication process, the more often the signal is fired between the two neurons the more attracted to each other they become and the easier communication becomes. This is essentially called learning.
The chemicals involved in the process have a huge influence on how the neurons interact. They might make the neurons more efficient, or alter the sensitivity of the neurons, helping or hindering communication, they can override other signals coming into the brain providing a filter, all-in-all they provide the tuning. Serotonin as an example influences mood, impulsivity, anger and aggressiveness modifying brain activity that can otherwise lead to depression, anxiety and obsessive compulsiveness. Adrenaline amplifies signals that influence things like attention, perception, motivation and arousal, these chemicals are known as neurotransmitters. Exercise has a direct impact on the amount of these chemicals in the system and therefore helps balance their mix in the brain.
Another group of substances that impact the brain are known as factors. The main one concerned here being BDNF or brain derived neurotrophic factor. The neurotransmitters carry out signalling and govern how well the circuits work; the factors like BDNF build the circuits. BDNF is like water for grass, or fertilizer for crops, nourishing the neurons that make up the brain’s communication system. In fact researcher found that if they sprinkled BDNF onto neurons in a Petri dish they actually grew and sprouted new neurons and more branches. BDNF even turns up the communication between neurons making it easier for neurotransmitters to do their work across the gap (synapse), truly an amazing substance that is key to what I’m getting at. BDNF is increased in the body with increased exercise. In a study in Germany in 2007 researchers found that people learned vocabulary words 20% faster following exercise than they did before exercise and that the rate of learning correlated directly with levels of BDNF. BDNF prepares the brain for what is to follow, this means that if you exercise you won’t automatically become more intelligent, however your brain will function better and therefore will be able to process, organise and retain information better than if you don’t exercise and have a lowered level of BDNF in your system as a result.
This is the tip of the iceberg in what is a hugely complex area of exercise physiology and the brain. But what you can take from it is these three things:
1) Understand that mind and body are one and influence each other intrinsically.
2) Exercise your brain daily to help develop its circuitry and prevent degradation. Never stop learning.
3) Aerobically exercise each morning if possible to create a healthy chemical balance in your body and therefore your mind. If you are just beginning start walking everyday. If you have a good base of fitness try interval training. Interval training combines a mix of moderate to hard exercise, try it over a period of 30-60mins, it is thought to be best in influencing the chemical cocktail.
Just do it and enjoy it, it is the most effective, safe, accessible and positive drug you could possibly lay your hands on.
Please consult your health professional before taking up a new exercise regime or modifying your current program.
See also an article in the weekend financial review on Alzheimer’s, exercise and BDNF!