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A few tips to optimize daily brain functioning through sports practice

           The numerous effects of exercising on general health are now well-understood. An extensive line of research leaves no question about whether or not moving around brings benefits to your body. Besides the impact on weight, fat mass, unhealthy cholesterol and cardiovascular disease risks, to cite just a few, research has underlined its effect on mental health—mainly anxiety and depression—among many other conditions.

            However, recent studies have shown that not only does exercising help you build a healthier and more resilient body, but it also improves your cognitive functions, that is, your brain capacity as a whole. Cognition enhancement is a lucrative and fast-growing business, most notably based on expensive computer training and professional seminars. Well, it might work. In most cases, it actually does. But exercising can do the job just as good—if not better—for much less out of your pocket. Now, although moving around surely is a first step if the alternative was to be lying on the couch watching your favorite TV show, a few basic rules can easily be applied to guarantee the best results at the gym.

Find something you like and stick to it. This might sound obvious, but most people who get started on a training program give up within the first few months. Why is that? Because they feel like the results they see don’t quite balance out the sacrifices they’ve made. This is very common in any fitness program, and whether your prime objective is to lose weight or improve your cognitive functioning doesn’t make much difference—you want to stay motivated. In fact, studies show that neural plasticity induced from exercising is more important and long-lasting when it is self-motivated rather than forced by external factors. Some people have greater capacities to stay involved in a program and stick to their initial plan, but the truth is, it’s much easier if you like what you do. So, whether you’ve always wanted to try that extreme sport or you’ve meant to get back to that activity you used to practice as a teenager, one motto here: go for it!
Challenge yourself. If cognition enhancement is your objective, then routine is your enemy. In order to create new connections and wire together new cell patterns in your brain, you have to quit staying in your ‘comfort zone’.  I don’t mean just physiologically: you should also seek new skills to learn, or at the very least to improve. To overcome routine, you need to find challenging situations that allow you to reach new possibilities. Compete with others. Encourage positive rivalry. Measure your performance. And stop making ‘safe’ choices. Your co-worker asked you to go to a salsa class? Your friends want you to try this aerobic routine they’ve practiced? Or you want to give a shot at the next running race in your county? Quit loitering around and around. Just dive in!
Become an athlete. Competitive sports are a constant challenge for your brain, because you have to adapt to other individuals who have trained hard to master similar skills to yours. They provide you with continuously challenging situations that are most profitable for cognitive improvements. Brain-imaging techniques have shown the exceptional plasticity of elite athletes motor cortex, cerebellum, and hippocampus, which are involved in nearly all daily activities.
Seek novelty and diversity. New situations activate specific parts of the brain, such as the prefrontal cortex, because a new coordination needs to be explicitly understood before it can be fully mastered. This brain area is the one that has evolved the most overtime, to distinguish us from our ancestors, and is known to be the center of high-level thinking and reasoning. So try new things. This can mean new activities, involving a different range of perceptive modalities, but not necessarily. You may learn new motor patterns within your favorite sport. You play in the field? Try goalkeeping. You play tennis with a perfectly steady baseline game? Come to the net, play the game in all its facets. New coordination patterns will emerge, inducing neural changes overtime. You practice judo, wrestling or climbing? Try blindfolding yourself. This will instantly force your brain to use different perceptive information, usually available but not attended to. Feel like you want to give back what you once received? What about coaching? Verbalizing in order to teach automated skills engage different cognitive processes from those involved when performing skills, which induces motor knowledge transfer to higher cognitive structures. Research in the field of neuroplasticity leaves no doubts about one thing: novelty and diversity are crucial in order to increase neural growth. That doesn’t necessarily mean in a sport context, but it can definitely be applied to it.
Remember to exercise long enough. In order to target physiological changes that can benefit brain functioning, you need to emphasize on aerobic exercise. This type of exercise will favor different neurophysiological changes, such as the construction of new brain cells (neurogenesis), the creation of new synapses between these brain cells, the formation of new blood vessels (angiogenesis), and the increase of neurotransmitters concentration and overall brain volume.

            Well, enough reading for you here. It’s time to get started. Grab your sneakers and get out there. And remember: changes that you don’t see may be the most important there are, so don’t hold back!