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27348Can Exercise Make You Smarter?
Most people accept that exercise is great for overall physical health. Less widely understood, though, is the way exercise can also influence the brain. Beyond building stronger muscles and a healthier heart, physical activity may improve how we think, remember, and learn.
The Relationship Between Exercise & Cognitive Performance
Studies consistently show that exercise changes the brain in ways that support sharper recall, better focus, and quicker learning. A large meta-analysis published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine in 2024 compiled strong evidence that exercise, even at low intensities, enhances cognition, fortifies memory, and bolsters executive function.
Importantly, the literature demonstrates that these improvements occur across diverse populations. Benefits have been shown in children, adolescents, adults, and older adults, as well as in clinical groups, including people with cognitive impairment, dementia, neurological disorders, stroke, chronic diseases, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, where executive function gains appear especially strong.
These widespread gains are impressive but, for many, a generic prescription to exercise more doesn’t move the needle on motivation. So, how can we use exercise to immediate advantage?
Practical Applications for Learning
In addition to longer-term and broad-based benefits, exercise can be employed strategically for learning, and even a single session can make a difference.
Research suggests that a workout before study or practice can ‘prime’ the brain to better integrate new information. For example, in one paper, people who walked on a treadmill before learning foreign language vocabulary remembered more words in the days that followed compared with when they remained sedentary.
Perhaps less intuitively, exercise after learning can also play a potent role, particularly for motor skills. High intensity activity soon after practice has been shown to strengthen consolidation of memories into long-term storage. Interestingly, including exercise both before and after practice appears to provide the greatest improvements in retention for skills such as playing an instrument, typing, or sport techniques.
For factual or declarative learning, such as preparing for an exam, a fascinating 2016 study found that exercising four hours after study produced the strongest improvements in recall, suggesting that different types of memory may respond to different schedules.
There’s even evidence that combining exercise with rest can help. In one experiment, participants who cycled before a learning session and then took a nap performed better on memory tests than those who only exercised or only napped. This underscores how movement and recovery can work together to reinforce new information.
How Exercise Influences the Brain
The simplest explanation is that exercise improves blood flow to the brain, ensuring a steady supply of oxygen and nutrients. Importantly, though, it also stimulates the release of key proteins. One crucial player is a substance called Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF), which helps nerve cells build stronger connections. This dynamic ‘networking’ of neurons is a vital aspect of any successful learning. Aerobic training, in particular, has been linked with higher BDNF levels, which likely undergirds its benefits.
In different forms of exercise, other molecules also seem to play a role. For example, resistance training appears less productive of circulating BDNF, but may exert similar neuroplastic effects by releasing insulin-like growth factors and myokines from the muscles.
Repeated exposure to exercise and the subsequent chemical cascades can then facilitate longer-term structural changes in the brain. Cortical areas critical for memory, such as the hippocampus, actually grow in size when people take part in regular training.
Which Kind of Exercise Works Best?
Aerobic activities, such as walking, running, cycling and swimming, are consistently linked with improvements in memory and attention. It’s unclear whether any specific type is more beneficial but, when it comes to intensity, moderate exercise for ~20-60 minutes appears to be the sweet spot. Turning the dial further towards extremely intense training seems to reduce learning benefits, possibly due to fatigue and corporal competition for resources.
Resistance training is also valuable, though it may work via different mechanisms, and the evidence is perhaps less compelling. Long-term programs have still been shown to sharpen executive function in older adults, while even a single short session of high-intensity resistance work can improve memory within a few days in younger adults.
Researchers also highlight mind-body exercises like Tai Chi, yoga, dancing, and exergaming (video games involving physical exercise) as some of the most effective lower intensity strategies. The simultaneous combination of physical challenge with mental demands seems especially useful for augmenting cognition and memory.
Summing Up
As we continue to learn more about the brain, cognitive enhancement strategies will surely become more mainstream. The implications of existing research already extend well beyond the lab. If you’re a student preparing for exams, exercising four hours after a study session can help secure new material into memory. If you’re a professional about to deliver a presentation or tackle complex problem solving, a brisk walk beforehand may help heighten focus. Or if you’re learning a new skill such as a golf swing, a piece of music, or a craft technique, pairing practice with movement before and/or after may strengthen retention.
Encapsulated, exercise before an activity prepares the brain to take in new information, while exercise after helps lock it in. Viewed through this lens, exercise – rather than stealing time from other productive pursuits – can be seen as a potent catalyst to make learning and performance more effective. Virtually any exercise is useful for its own sake but, since we can, why not harness it to optimise the way we learn?
