A longitudinal study by University of Queensland researchers has found high-intensity interval exercise improves brain function in older adults for up to 5 years.
Emeritus Professor Perry Bartlett and Dr Daniel Blackmore from UQ’s Queensland Brain Institute led the study in which volunteers did physical exercise and had brain scans.
Emeritus Professor Bartlett said it is the first controlled study of its kind to show exercise can boost cognition in healthy older adults not just delay cognitive decline.
“Six months of high-intensity interval training is enough to flick the switch,” Emeritus Professor Bartlett said.
Thank you for providing a link to this paper. As someone with a family history of Alzheimer’s and feeling some decline in my working memory, it is an appealing topic of research. It’s not a trivial research paper; took me a while to digest it. I’m also one who puts in lots of daily exercise (1.5 hrs daily of climbing stairs on a local dam), so I was intrigued by the exercise intensity required for their definition of “high intensity training”. They used heart rate to measure the intensity after a Bruce Protocol treadmill test. Reading through the entire paper plus the long supplement, never was the age-associated intensity HR’s provided. It would be interesting reading. Using a standard formula for my age of 73 yrs, my HR max would be 157 and the HIT-level HR in this study would be 85%-95% of that, so 133-149. I’ll break out my HR chest strap and see what I achieve at the top of the 111 steps, but I believe I will probably have to do double steps to get my HR that high. While the authors mentioned on the shift from aerobic to anaerobic as the likely area of benefit, I think I will also get a lactate too.
Anyway, interesting stuff. Thank you for the link.
I wished to correlate what I do each morning with the above study and so I broke out my HR strap and lactate meter, being sure that my meter was within calibration, then measured both during my normal daily exercise routine. Unfortunately in the above research article, lactates were not measured, but they referenced 3 intensity zones, ostensibly referring to what many of us would call zone 1, 2, and 3, with zone 2 being in the “able to complete a sentence but not wishing to, a lactate level of ~2.0, and able to maintain that intensity for 60 min”. Zone 3 would be breathlessness and a lactate north of 2.0. I also referred back to my hospital record when I had an exercise stress test ~5 years ago (at age 68) where I found my HRmax to be 148. If I drop off 1 heart beat/min/additional year of age, my max should be 143 (at age 73). My exercise routine is to climb 111 steps (8" rise), turn and descend those 111 steps, no rest, X 9000 total steps each morning, 7 d/wk, 52 wk/yr. Here are my lactates:
HR…Lactate…%of HRmax
118…2.6 …82% (could go all day)
123…6.1 …86% (closer to my normal pace after 5-10 sets)
127…8.0 …88% (hurrying)
134…19.6 …93% (doing double steps)
After reaching a lactate of 19.6 at a HR = 134, simply walking down the stairs and retaking my lactate 1.5 minutes later, it had dropped to 4.7 and my HR to 94. That is the difficulty in taking lactates-- they have to be accomplished immediately, hopefully within seconds of cessation of exercise.
I wrote several authors of the above paper and wondered if they might have drawn lactates. They had not but plan to in a follow-up paper. I cannot help but wonder if they recognize the very time-dependent problem with lactates, ie, seconds count, but if they can develop a strict protocol that is followed, it would be an objective measure of exercise intensity.
My plan is to repeat the above target HR’s but when the temps are cooler to compare lactates.
Peter Attia’s free weekly newsletter covering the “Long-Term Improvement in Hippocampal-Dependent Learning Ability in Healthy” study. As always, a well done review of study limitations and what can be taken from the study for personal use. I have always wondered how the researchers got participants to stick to the 4 x 4 hit training as it can be pretty intense.