Exercise is a preventive medicine as well as an antidote. Exercise particularly affects our executive function - planning, organization, initiate or delay a response, consequence evaluation, learning from mistake, maintain the focus, working memory and it helps us to access the front part of the brain It lifts your mood. More neurotransmitters, neurotrophins, and connectivity shore up the hippocampus against the atrophy associated with depression and anxiety. And a number of studies have shown that keeping our mood up reduces our chances of developing dementia. The evidence applies not only to clinical depression but also to general attitude. Staying mobile also allows us to stay involved, keep up with people, and make new friends; social connections are important in elevating and sustaining mood.

The first few chapters in this book begun as a delightful and insightful exploration into a high school that revolutionised the way they did exercise/gym class and the significant positive effects that had. I was delighted by the book in the first few chapters and excited to read the rest. but from then on i was very disappointed. An excellent exercise motivator! This being a pop-science book it'll be most effective if you're a logically minded person or in need of some explicit reasons to overcome creeping apathy or procrastination. One of the best aspects of a book on exercise is that you can test and verify the essential ideas as they relate to your own experience; I often listened to the audiobook while jogging or at the gym. Knowing more about how something you're doing is good for you is an additional reward in itself, and for me this encapsulates the main value of reading this book. Apache Spark has seen immense growth over the past several years. Hundreds of contributors working collectively have made Spark an amazing piece of technology powering thousands of organizations. And while the blistering pace of innovation moves the project forward, it makes keeping up to date with all the improvements challenging. If you're the kind of person who needs to be intellectually convinced by mountains of research to confirm something you already know - as I am - and you're trying desperately to start a regular exercise habit - as I am - you need to run and get this book, like, yesterday. I'm actually very serious: I have a very athletic husband, who is the epitome of healthy living, as an example in front of me every day; I've read tons of articles about the benefits of exercise, and have known for practically my whole life the importance of getting my body moving. But my mind resisted, and has just never really gotten with the program, so to speak... Ratey goes in depth with research and science and explains the most complex parts and functions of brain, different neurotransmitters and different issues such as stress, anxiety, depression, attention deficit, addiction aging, hormonal changes and many more unfamiliar details about effects of exercise, everything written in well organized and in easy- read way that makes the reader not to put this book down.People who are addicted to bad habits get addicted to it because they need the pleasure to overcome depression, anger, stress and pain. This book tells us how to avoid bad habits and start exercising. People who thinks that exercise is an additional work or burden should read this book and understand the importance of exercise and how it can change their life. Physical activities change biological reaction in the body. People who do regular exercise stay on top on a country level - which includes technology, sports, etc. I enjoyed reading in detail about what goes on in the brain during various kinds of exercises performed regularly, as well as the overall body benefits. The preventive effects of neural degeneration have been outstanding. Exercise helps with alleviating the effects of stress, it helps with focus and with curbing withdrawal effects of addiction. What I love about this book is the way he explains everything in scientific detail--no oversimplification or handwaving. The explanation of the stress response really brought together and cleared up a few other things I had read about how stress affects your body. Now I feel like I really understand it. He gives the full story, yet the style is engaging and never obfuscated. This is the best thing I've read in months. I have faith that when people come to recognize how their lifestyle can improve their health span--living better, not simply longer--they will, at the very least, be more inclined to stay active. And when they come to accept that exercise is as important for the brain as it is for the heart, they’ll commit to it. Here’s how exercise keeps you going: And so on. Perhaps this will make me sound very ignorant, but most of the science boiled down to: exercise makes the body produce chemical X, which is beneficial to the brain.

One takeaway from the book is that does not mention longevity. This book is about enhancing the quality of life not prolonging it. Its purpose is to keep the brain healthy so that you can enjoy doing the things you like for as long as you have. Neuroscientists have just begun studying exercise’s impact within brain cells — at the genes themselves. Even there, in the roots of our biology, they’ve found signs of the body’s influence on the mind. It turns out that moving our muscles produces proteins that travel through the bloodstream and into the brain, where they play pivotal roles in the mechanisms of our highest thought processes. They bear names such as insulin-like growth factor (IGF-1) and vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), and they provide an unprecedented view of the mind-body connection. It’s only in the past few years that neuroscientists have begun to describe these factors and how they work, and each new discovery adds awe-inspiring depth to the picture. There’s still much we don’t understand about what happens in the microenvironment of the brain, but I think what we do know can change people’s lives. And maybe society itself..." What makes aerobic exercise so powerful is that it's our evolutionary method of generating that spark. It lights a fire on every level of your brain, from stoking up the neurons' metabolic furnaces to forging the very structures that transmit information from one synapse to the next." The author begins the writing in the book proper by examining Naperville Central High School in Chicago, which adds a heavy emphasis on physical exercise, to great effect. It should be no surprise that humans respond positively to exercise. We're descendants of hunter-gatherers who were optimized over thousands of years by evolution to walk and run around the equivalent of many miles per day (i.e. the couch potato of the caveman era died young).Did you know you can beat stress, lift your mood, fight memory loss, sharpen your intellect, and function better than ever simply by elevating your heart rate and breaking a sweat? The evidence is incontrovertible: Aerobic exercise physically remodels our brains for peak performance. What I aim to do here is to deliver in plain English the inspiring science connecting exercise and the brain and to demonstrate how it plays out in the lives of real people. I want to cement the idea that exercise has a profound impact on cognitive abilities and mental health. It is simply one of the best treatments we have for most psychiatric problems..." Caution - don't read this book if you don't like to move. Because this book will motivate you get moving and hit gym consistently. Book is written in most convincing form that we will never think about impact of exercise on our body and brain in same way again.