Ronan Oliveira argues that walking and other cardiovascular exercise can reverse age-related brain shrinkage and improve cognition. He presents three practical strategies: a daily 20-minute brisk walk to raise baseline BDNF (claimed up to ~130% increase), a morning 10-minute light walk to boost learning/memory/mood for the day, and short high-intensity activity before demanding cognitive tasks (cited ~20% vocabulary learning improvement). He cites studies comparing walking vs stretching (~2% brain growth vs ~1% shrinkage over a year) and uses evolutionary reasoning to link movement with brain development.
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When you reach your 30s, your brain starts to shrink, and that's a bad thing because a smaller brain has less brain cells and that decreases your cognitive capabilities throughout the decades. But there's a way to reverse that. And that's what I want to tell you about. I take this thing every day that not only stops my brain from shrinking, it makes my brain grow as I grow older. I take this every day and it has great side effects. It improves my learning abilities for at least 20%, improves my capabilities of non linear thinking, creativity, solving difficult problems. It also balances my brain waves. So if I'm feeling sluggish, it brings me up. If I'm feeling too stressed, it brings me down to the balance, improves my mood, it makes me happy, and it's freaking cheap. Do you want to know what it is? This, this is just mint. I take this for the taste. What I take for all these brain benefits is a morning walk. Let's go. Let me ask you this. How much do you walk? And did you know that walking is perhaps the best thing that you can do to improve your brain's cognitive abilities and longevity in the long term? You know, we found this out through animal studies. If you ask yourself, why is it that we have brains? Have you ever asked yourself, that's an interesting question, isn't it? The neuroscientist Daniel Wolpert in his TED talk says that we have brains just because we need to be able to execute complex movements. Forms of life that don't need to execute complex movements don't have brains like plants, for example. And the more complex the movements you need to execute, the more evolved your brain is. So this happened to chimpanzees, for example, 6 million years ago, they had a energy crisis situation, so they needed to travel longer to find food and then remember where their group was by the end of the day to come back and be with their groups and rest. And so this demand for more movement and more complex movement is what evolved their brains towards ours. And the opposite also happened with koalas, for example. Koalas, they evolved in the reverse way. So they were used to having a very diverse diet. And they evolved to eat only the leaf of one type of tree, the eucalyptus leaf. And so they evolved to have less movement, to be stuck into one tree only. And when this shift happened, their brains decreased by 25%. So the amount of movement and the complexity of movement is what makes our brains grow and develop. Gene Quick says that as your body moves, your brain grooves. The problem is that nowadays we're not moving as much. So if your body doesn't move, your brain doesn't groove. There are three main ways that you can use walking. Three smart strategies to improve your capabilities of cognition and your brain's longevity. The first one is a daily habit of 20 minutes off of walking. It can be daily or every other day. And what it does is while you are walking, your brain is releasing a chemical called bdnf, Brain derived neurotropic factor. John Ratting, he's the author of the book Spark. He talks about this chemical as a brain fertilizer. Now, when the brain marinates in this chemical, your neurons start to branch out and multiply in real time. And the daily habit increases your brain's abilities to release this chemical by up to 130% more. It increases your baseline of this chemical. So if you build this consistency, isn't this amazing? If you build this consistency of daily habit or every other day, you are improving your brains in the long term. And even if you take a break, if you don't exercise for one or two weeks, this baseline remains high. So this is a habit that helps the longevity of the brain. But it needs to be, this type of exercise needs to be a walking any type of cardiovascular exercise. There's a study for example, where they put two groups of people, people to do exercise every other day for 40 minutes. In their case, one group was walking and the other group was stretching. And only the group who was walking saw a growth in their brain. After a year 2% growth, the group was doing stretching instead saw a shrinkage of 1%, which was the expected already. So that's the caveat here. And your walk needs to be faster, fast to the point that you raises your heart rate. The group stretching was not increasing your heart rate. And that's probably one of the reasons why their brains shrunk instead of grow. The second strategy that you can apply is to bring 10 of those 20 minutes to the morning. There's a Japanese study that was asking what is it that we can do? What's the minimum that we can do? Maybe not to build our brains in the long term, but, but just to enjoy the cognitive enhancements of daily activity. And they found out that only 10 minutes of very light movement is already enough to improve your learning capabilities, to improve your memory, to increase your mood, and to have your brain working as a rock star. So bring those 10 minutes for the beginning of your day and now you are in a better mental shape for the rest of the day. And the third strategy is to increase the intensity of when you are about to do something tougher. So if you are about to do a meeting that you need to solve a problem, or if you need to use your creativity or you need to learn, study something. You want to start to go for a jog, you want to run, or you want to walk upstairs or uphill, so your heart rate raises a little more and that increases more oxygen to your brain. There's a German study that found out that people who went for a run, they improved their capabilities of learning the new vocabulary by 20% just because of the run that they went for. They increased their brain's capabilities for a high intensity period for the demand. So if you need your brain to be performing super well, you want to increase the intensity of movement just before you do that. So here's one thing that I wanted to ask you now. How many steps do you take a day? And how many steps do you want to take this week going forward? After watching this video, let me know in the comments because I want to know if you are motivated to increase your walking habits so that you increase your brain's capabilities as well. The last thing that I want to ask you is if you want to be featured in these videos, in my mindvalley health and fitness videos, there is a way to do so. If you have a question, I want you to record this question in a camera and send this question in the direct message in my Instagrammer so that increases the resistance a little bit. So if you're really motivated to have a question answered, you take these steps, record them to me, send them on my Instagram and the questions that are there. I'll get the best questions and put them in these videos that are coming forward and answer your questions and ask my invite videos now. I will talk to you in the comments and I see you in the next video.
