Exercise your mind and body

By Dr Ian Clarke

I have noticed a recent trend since the advent of COVID-19; more people are on the roads exercising.

These are not pedestrians getting from A to B, these are people of all shapes and sizes, who are deliberately exercising.

Some of them are fit, some are unfit, some are old, some are young.

There are male and female, slim and fat, but what they have in common is they are part of the exercise fraternity. This is a good trend since the activity that has the most beneficial effect on our health is exercise.

In the evolution of mankind, we have moved from being very active to being sedentary, and this has had a detrimental effect on our health.

In bygone times, we were hunter-gatherers, which meant that we were walking and running a lot. Now we get into our cars and sit in the office, which causes us to gain weight and develop diabetes and high blood pressure.

Exercise not only builds our muscles but also improves the function of our heart so that blood is pumped around the body more efficiently. Professional athletes have a slow heart rate because their heart pumps strongly.

It is like a car that has a bigger engine. Oxygen is essential to life, we can survive without food for weeks, without water for days, but we can only survive without oxygen for a few minutes.

Oxygen is used by every cell in the body for the process of producing energy. The oxygen is breathed into the lungs, gets to the alveoli (the small sacs) within the lungs, where it gets taken up by the blood and pumped to all the vital organs by the heart.

One organ that has a very high demand for oxygen is the brain (it uses 20% of the body's oxygen). When people exercise, they feel better because they increase the blood supply to the brain.

Therefore, they feel more alert, their mood improves and they feel less stressed. Surprisingly, if you have a long stressful day at work, the best thing to do is not to sit down and watch television, but to go for a run or a brisk walk. After that, you will feel less strung up.

There are two types of exercise: there is aerobic, which strengthens the cardiovascular system (the heart and circulation) and exercise which increases strength. Both are good, but cardiovascular has more benefits.

Just 30 minutes of brisk walking or jogging three times a week makes a marked difference to your health. Strengthening exercises improve the musculoskeletal system and are good for protecting bones and joints. Another form that is useful is to exercise the brain.

The brain is just like any other muscle and if you use it more, it will become more developed. It has been shown through MRI scanning that people with certain specialised skills have certain parts of their brain that become more developed.

For example, in a professional violin player's brain, the neurons which control the left hand are much more developed than those that control the right hand.

This is because the left-hand does all the precise finger work on the strings, while the left hand only has to hold the bow.

The brain is designed to learn new things all the time, but some people put their brains into neutral and stop learning as they get older. It is known that such people are more at risk from Alzheimer's than those who remain mentally active as they get older.

The idea that we learn at school and university and then coast through the rest of our lives without learning anything new is wrong. A dull mind results in a dull person and early death. Mental-like physical exercise happens when we challenge ourselves.

When one commences physical exercise, the muscles hurt, so we want to stop and rest, but we set ourselves goals and don't give up. It is the same with mental exercise.

We challenge ourselves to read a book, instead of scrolling through social media mindlessly.

We listen to educational podcasts sometimes, not just watching entertainment at all times. We can start a new project which requires us learning something new. The message is — exercise your body and the mind. As the saying goes — use it or lose it.