The Rundown

Blame It On The Brain. According to Daniel Lieberman, a human evolutionary biologist and author of Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do is Healthy and Rewarding, that voice in your head that says, “I don’t want to exercise” is normal and natural. Humans evolved to deal with a high level of activity but also to seek out rest when possible in order to conserve energy for when movement was necessary or desired. In other words, the evolutionary instinct to conserve energy remains.

An associate professor at the University of Ottawa demonstrated Lieberman’s point in a 2018 study. Matthieu Boisgontier gave people control of a digital avatar while they were connected to brain-activity monitors. They were instructed to move the avatar away from images of sedentary behavior that appeared on screen and toward images of physical activity.

Boisgontier and his team found that avoiding sedentary behavior took more brain power, suggesting that we have an “automatic tendency” to pick relaxing over moving. Combine this with modern life, which offers us plenty of opportunities to choose rest over movement, and it’s a recipe for unhealthy behaviors.

Exercise psychologists suggest that there are ways to trick your brain into exercising and one is feeling confident about your ability. So if you’re struggling, start small and progress over time. Other strategies include replacing guilt with self-compassion and reframing what exercise is by finding ways to move that you enjoy. You can also combine exercise with something you want to do like riding a bike or walking with a friend so it’s both a workout and a social activity.

Skill Set. If you want to improve your fine motor skills, a study from the University of Copenhagen says exercising before and after you practice them will help you improve and remember what you have learned.

Researchers from the Department of Nutrition, Exercise and Sports recruited 67 men between the ages of 18 and 35 to play a computer game designed to challenge and practice their motor dexterity. (They wore a small device on their fingertips to monitor the activity). One group trained at a moderate intensity before playing. A second group exercised intensely after they played. A third group trained before and after playing. The control group did not exercise. The men’s skill level and memory were tested again seven days later to find out if they remembered what they had learned.

The team saw around a 10% improvement in the men’s ability to remember a learned motor skill when exercise was included either before or after and it was enhanced if they exercised at both times.

A co-author of the study theorizes that physical activity increases the brain’s ability to change, which is a prerequisite for remembering. The effect applies to everyone, but in particular people who regularly need to learn new skills.

How this research applies to those who already have elite motor skills is an intriguing question for a future study. The researchers also hope to conduct a longer-term investigation to find out whether the effects of the current study become greater over time.

Extra Point

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5 Laws of Sleep for Athletes. Alex Hutchinson summarizes a talk by sleep expert Charles Samuels on some of the tactics that do and don't help athletes deal with sleep problems in this 2022 piece for Outside magazine.