The Rundown

Strength, Muscle, Brain. Resistance training can make you stronger and it can increase the size of your muscles. While these two things are connected, they aren’t exactly the same. You can get stronger without adding muscle and you can add muscle without necessarily becoming functionally stronger. According to a new paper, when it comes to your brain health, getting stronger wins over bulking up.

The study from Queen’s University in Canada and the University of Washington looked at the distinction between strength and muscle and examined how each impacts the rate of cognitive decline in older adults.

The teams used data from over 1,400 adults over age 60 who were part of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Study (NHANES) between 1999 and 2002. The participants had DEXA scans to assess body composition, tests for leg strength and cognitive abilities and filled out questionnaires about physical activity habits. The DEXA scan was used to calculate an appendicular lean mass index, which approximates how much muscle you have in your legs and arms and a fat-free mass index, which reveals total muscle relative to height.

The scientists found that strength was a much stronger predictor of cognitive performance than muscle mass, accounting for about five percent of the variance in cognitive scores. (Muscle mass explained only 0.5 percent). The NHANES data supported the theory that in terms of brain health, muscle only mattered to the extent that it made you stronger.

The study’s authors aren’t suggesting that muscle mass doesn’t matter but their results did show that having low muscle mass had no significant effect on cognitive scores. However, peak leg force (a marker of strength) had a significant benefit.

(Don’t) Take a Seat. According to new research from University College London, any activity is better for your heart than sitting. The study, supported by the British Heart Foundation, is the first to examine how different movement patterns throughout the day are linked to heart health.

The researchers analyzed data from six studies that included more than 15,000 people from five countries. All the participants wore a wearable device on their thigh to track their activity over a 24-hour day and had their heart health measured.

Time spent doing moderate to vigorous activity provided the most benefit to the heart, followed by light activity, standing and sleeping. When the team modeled what would happen if a person changed various amounts of one behavior for another each day for a week, replacing sedentary behavior for as little as five minutes of moderate to vigorous activity saw a noticeable effect on heart health.

It’s no surprise that becoming more active is beneficial for your heart. But what’s new in this study is that it considered a range of behaviors across the whole 24-hour day and when it comes to heart health, you may not want to take a seat, at least for too long.

Lead author Dr. Joanna Blodgett sums up the results, “The most beneficial change we observed was replacing sitting with moderate to vigorous activity…basically any activity that raises your heart rate and makes you breathe faster, even for a minute or two.”

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