从沙发上起来!通过锻炼来提振大脑永远不会太迟

从沙发上起来!通过锻炼来提振大脑永远不会太迟

Why is everyone telling us to exercise while we're stuck at home? Because if there is a single thing you could do to improve your health, it would be to get up and get moving.

为什么大家都叫我们呆在家里时锻炼呢?因为如果你能做一件事来改善你的健康，那就是站起来行动起来。

Breaking a sweat has been shown to improve nearly every organ in the body, fight nearly every disease doctors diagnose and improve nearly every health condition that you might live with on a daily basis.

研究表明，流汗可以改善身体的几乎每一个器官，对抗医生诊断的几乎每一种疾病，改善日常生活中可能出现的几乎每一种健康状况。

Your brain loves it, too. Increasing your heart rate pumps more oxygen-rich blood to the brain, stimulating the release of hormones that boost the production of new brain cells and enhance connectivity between parts of the brain.

你的大脑也喜欢运动。心率加快会向大脑输送更多富含氧气的血液，刺激荷尔蒙的释放，从而促进新脑细胞的产生，增强大脑各部分之间的连接。

A new study finds , it only took six months of aerobic exercise, four days a week, to improve thinking and verbal skills in a group of older adults.

一项新的研究发现，在一组老年人中，只需要6个月的有氧运动，每周四天，就可以提高思维和语言能力。

"Even if you start an exercise program later in life, the benefit to your brain may be immense," said study author Marc Poulin, an exercise physiology and nutrition professor at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada.

该研究的作者、加拿大阿尔伯塔省卡尔加里大学运动生理学和营养学教授马克•波林说:“即使你在晚年才开始一项锻炼计划，对大脑的益处可能也是巨大的。”

"Our study showed that six months' worth of vigorous exercise may pump blood to regions of the brain that specifically improve your verbal skills as well as memory and mental sharpness," Poulin said.

波林说:“我们的研究表明，六个月的充满活力的运动可以将血液输送到大脑的某些区域，这些区域可以提高你的语言能力、记忆力和思维敏锐度。”

The study, published Wednesday in Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology, followed 206 adults with an average age of 66 and no prior cognitive issues.

这项研究周三发表在《神经病学》杂志上，这是美国神经病学学会的医学杂志，对206名成年人进行了跟踪调查，他们的平均年龄为66岁，之前没有认知问题。

Under supervision, they increased their aerobic exercise from 20 to 40 minutes three times a week and exercised on their own one day a week. An ultrasound measured blood flow to the brain at the start of the study, and a cognitive baseline was established on thinking and memory tests.

在监督下，他们每周三次将有氧运动时间从20分钟增加到40分钟，每周自己锻炼一天。在研究开始时，超声波测量了流向大脑的血液流量，并根据思维和记忆测试建立了认知基线。

Six months later, the participants were retested. Blood flow had increased, and tests of executive function, which includes mental flexibility and self-correction, had improved by nearly 6%. Verbal fluency, which tests how quickly you can retrieve information, increased by 2.4%, the study found.

六个月后，参与者再次接受测试。血液流动增加，包括思维灵活性和自我纠正在内的执行功能测试提高了近6%。研究发现，测试检索信息速度的语言流利度增加了2.4%。

"This change in verbal fluency is what you'd expect to see in someone five years younger," Poulin said.

波林说:“语言流利度的这种变化是你在比你小五岁的孩子身上看到的。”

Because the study did not compare the people doing the exercise to a control group of similar people who were not exercising, the study cannot know for sure if exercise was the reason for the improvement in cognition.

因为这项研究没有将做运动的人与不运动的类似人群的对照组进行比较，所以这项研究无法确定运动是否是认知能力提高的原因。

Still, to find an increase in memory and thinking skills at a time in life when they would be "expected to be decreasing due to normal aging, to have these types of increases is exciting," Poulin said.

尽管如此，波林说，在生活中“由于正常的衰老，记忆和思维能力预计会下降”的时候，发现记忆和思维能力的提高是令人兴奋的。

Even more exciting: disproving that old saw that you can't teach an old dog new tricks. Maybe they just didn't exercise the pooch enough!

更令人兴奋的是:推翻了“老狗学不了新把戏”的说法。也许它们只是没有得到足够锻炼的狗!