Room 5 · Observatory
Exercise and memory
Verdict: A workout can help you remember what you learn right after. Long-term effects in healthy adults are small or unclear.
Exercise is good for you in many ways. Whether it gives you a better memory is a narrower question, and the answer depends on what you mean by it.
One workout, around the time you learn
A 2013 meta-analysis pooled the studies on single sessions of exercise. A bout of exercise around the time of learning had a moderate to large effect on how much people remembered later (Roig and colleagues, 2013).
Months of regular exercise
- A small effect, and not where you’d expect. The same meta-analysis found that regular exercise had a small effect on short-term memory and no clear effect on long-term memory (Roig and colleagues, 2013).
- A bigger hippocampus, the same memory gain. In a year-long trial, older adults who walked three times a week grew their hippocampus, a brain region central to memory, by about 2%. Their memory improved, but so did the memory of a control group who only did stretching (Erickson and colleagues, 2011).
- No proven benefit for healthy older adults. A Cochrane review found no evidence that aerobic exercise improves thinking in older people without memory problems (Young and colleagues, 2015).
So, should you move?
Yes, for many reasons, and memory is one of the smaller ones. If you want to use it for study, take a brisk walk before or after a session. If you want to remember more, the technique still does most of the work.
Sources (3)
- Roig M et al. (2013). The effects of cardiovascular exercise on human memory: a review with meta-analysis. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 37(8):1645–1666. doi:10.1016/j.neubiorev.2013.06.012
- Erickson KI et al. (2011). Exercise training increases size of hippocampus and improves memory. PNAS 108(7):3017–3022. doi:10.1073/pnas.1015950108
- Young J et al. (2015). Aerobic exercise to improve cognitive function in older people without known cognitive impairment. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 4:CD005381. doi:10.1002/14651858.CD005381.pub4