{"id":494149,"date":"2026-03-25T08:44:08","date_gmt":"2026-03-25T08:44:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/494149\/"},"modified":"2026-03-25T08:44:08","modified_gmt":"2026-03-25T08:44:08","slug":"exercise-is-even-better-for-your-brain-than-we-thought-and-in-surprising-ways-new-report-shows","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/494149\/","title":{"rendered":"Exercise Is Even Better For Your Brain Than We Thought\u2014And in Surprising Ways, New Report Shows"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Estimated2 min read<\/p>\n

As people who love to ride their bikes, we already intuitively know that exercise is good for us. Most cyclists are also acutely aware of how much these benefits extend from the body to the mind.<\/p>\n

Stress has a detrimental effect<\/a> on brain health, along with the rest of our bodies, and it seems like a no-brainer that exercise helps us manage it. After all, it would be a tall ask to find a cyclist who doesn’t feel better after going for a ride. Personally, it\u2019s why I like to refer to rides as \u201cbrain showers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Related Story<\/p>\n

But it turns out there are many more benefits to breaking a sweat beyond managing stress, and they\u2019re not all in our heads. As Bicycling has previously reported, there\u2019s plenty of research demonstrating that exercise like riding improves mental health<\/a> as well as overall brain function, especially as we get older<\/a>.<\/p>\n

New research<\/a> from the University of South Australia sheds even more light on just how much exercise affects the brain and prevents age-related cognitive decline in older adults. While this takeaway from \u201cthe largest, most comprehensive umbrella review to date\u201d is powerful information, it\u2019s not exactly new. We\u2019ve known that exercise benefits brain health in seniors for quite some time.<\/p>\n

But here\u2019s where this new research gets interesting. The review concluded that exercise improves brain health, memory and cognition\u2014in other words, our ability to think\u2014not just in older adults, but in brains of all age groups, including young adults and children. In fact, young adults and kiddos saw the greatest improvement in memory, compared to the other groups.<\/p>\n

Related Story<\/p>\n

\u201cFor children and teens, exercise was especially beneficial for developing memory, while for people with ADHD, it helped improve focus, reduce impulsivity, and enhance executive function,\u201d says lead researcher Ben Singh, PhD.<\/p>\n

This leads us to another interesting finding of this research, which is how exercise affects the brain function of people with ADHD. Researchers found that those with ADHD exhibited greater improvements in executive function from regular low to moderate intensity exercise than the general population or any other clinical group.<\/p>\n

And it didn\u2019t take long for these improvements to manifest. \u201cIn particular, we found that benefits were delivered quickly with clear gains within 1-3 months, highlighting that even small bursts of activity can make a big difference,\u201d Dr. Singh says. \u201cIt also signals that trying out new activities could play a key role in keeping the brain engaged and active.\u201d (Ahem, might it be time to try a new riding discipline?)<\/p>\n

Over time, more and more research is becoming available that makes strong connections between how much we move our bodies and how good we feel. While these positive connections are more obvious from the outside, the ways our health is improved by getting enough exercise day-to-day is clearly much more than skin deep.<\/p>\n

But as cyclists, we already knew that.
<\/p>\n

Related Stories\"Lettermark\"<\/p>\n

Natascha has been a NASM-certified personal trainer for over ten years, focusing on functional strength training and corrective exercise\u2014which is a fancy way of saying her passion is teaching people how to move better, with more strength and less pain. She holds multiple certifications, including specializations in corrective exercise, stretching and flexibility, behavior change, nutrition and more. She\u2019s also been into bikes for almost three decades, and has at various times been a bike mechanic, a frame builder\u2019s apprentice, a grunt at a bike messenger company, a fitness studio owner, a Spin instructor and a few different things at a few different bike companies. These days, she\u2019s one of Bicycling\u2019s Health and Fitness editors.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"2 min read As people who love to ride their bikes, we already intuitively know that exercise is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":494150,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[11875,6647,102,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-494149","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-fitness","tag-core","tag-fitness","tag-health","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494149","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=494149"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494149\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/494150"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=494149"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=494149"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=494149"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}