Pumping Iron is Good for your Brawn AND Brain!
James Fell covers the topic in his latest “In Your Face Fitness” column for the LA Times.
Voss and her team examined more than 100 studies on the topic and discovered some interesting things. Here’s one: The brain benefits of resistance training (such as lifting weights) seem to differ from those you get from aerobic exercise. “Aerobic exercise improves ability to coordinate multiple things, long-term planning and your ability to stay on task for extended periods,” she said. Resistance training, which is much less studied than the aerobic side of things, “improves your ability to focus amid distracters.”
This makes sense to me: Aerobic exercise such as running involves staying on task for a long time, and if you’re training to get better, you need to stick to a plan. Weightlifting requires ignoring the spandex and lousy gym music and focusing enough to prevent the barbell from crushing your trachea during bench press. Perhaps honing the discipline for aerobic exercise and/or learning to tune out gym distractions reaps benefits for the other, non-athletic parts of your life.
That part about being able to tune out and focus on controlling the weights is sooooo true for my gym. They play a ton of top-40 crap – loudly – which would slowly drive me insane if I wasn’t able to tune it out. It would be nice if this ability to concentrate does more than keep my blood pressure down (as well as keep the bar off my trachea, lol) – time will tell, I guess.
