How to Use Exercise to Improve Your Brain’s Health, Longevity & Performance

60-70% of exercise's brain benefits come from one thing: arousal

Tens of thousands of studies show exercise improves brain health. About 60-70% of the benefit comes from arousal — whether it's cardio, resistance training, or even 6-second sprints, the brain boost is largely the same.

"Okay, so set aside any kind of, you know, like eye rolls or chuckles that you might have about single leg leg extensions as the total form of resistance training that's being explored, because yes, those studies are still informative. In fact, they perhaps even identified the lower threshold for the amount of resistance training and type of resistance training that could benefit the brain. But we also see studies that involve compound exercises. So having people do free weight squats or even weighted squats or deadlifts or bench press, dip, deadlift type combinations. Again, when you look at the literature exploring exercise and brain health, you're looking at studies that in the best cases are very tightly controlled. That typically means having people do them in the laboratory in a very specific way, sometimes using untrained subjects, meaning when the subjects arrive at the study, they haven't done much exercise of that sort. Sometimes it's involving trained subjects, both have their caveats, of course, but keep in mind that during today's discussion, I'm going to be pooling at many times across all these studies, exploring cardiovascular exercise of different duration and intensities, resistance training of different types, and sometimes different intensities as well, but where there is a specific piece of knowledge that can be gleaned from understanding the exact type of exercise that was done and a specific type of brain change, especially in cases where it's been shown to be especially beneficial, I will be sure to highlight that. So as we proceed in today's discussion, keep in mind, exercise is many things, two general categories. Most of the studies focus on high intensity or low intensity cardio. Most of the studies involve either single joint isolation exercises, sometimes even single joint, single leg isolation exercises or compound exercises. And keep in mind that most of the studies exploring the relationship between exercise and brain health and performance are done to explore two types of changes, either what are called acute changes, meaning immediate changes. So they have people do the exercise and then they have them take a cognitive test or some other form of test that analyzes brain health and performance, or they look at chronic effects, which are what are the changes in brain performance and health over long periods of time, meaning having people do a particular type of exercise anywhere from two to four times per week, although typically it's three times per week, and doing that for anywhere from four weeks to six months. Again, all of this relates to the practical aspects of running controlled studies in the laboratory. So if by now you're thinking this is really complicated, how is it that we're supposed to tease out the best things to do given this huge ball of barbed wire of different types of studies, variables, et cetera. Well, I assure you, we are going to make this very clear and very actionable. And the thing to keep in mind is that fortunately, most all of the studies, yes, most all of the studies that have explored the relationship between exercise, brain health and longevity and performance, find positive effects. Now, for some of you who are skeptics, you might be thinking, well, great. So you can do any form of exercise. Well, in some of you who are skeptics, you might be thinking, well, great. So you can do any form of exercise. Well, in some sense, yes. I'll actually tell you this right off the bat. There are good data showing that if people do six second sprints, max all out sprints on a stationary bicycle, followed by one minute rest and repeat that six times, you see significant acute effects on brain performance. So the brain performance could be a memory task. Sometimes it is a memory task. It could be what's called a Stroop task, which is a cognitive flexibility task where you have to distinguish between the colors that words are written in and the content of the words. Okay, so-called Stroop task. I've talked about this on previous podcasts. I'll talk about it a little bit more later. Regardless of the cognitive test that's used, that very short duration, high intensity training increases performance significantly."

Every type of exercise improves brain function acutely — the mechanism is shared

Resistance training, cardio, HIIT, and even single-joint exercises all improve cognitive performance immediately after. The shared mechanism is increased cerebral blood flow and arousal.

"Today, we are discussing exercise and brain health, which includes brain longevity and brain performance, our ability to learn new information over long periods of time and indeed into old age. Today, we are going to discuss how different forms of exercise, resistance training, cardiovascular training of both long, medium, and short duration can be used to improve the way that your brain functions acutely, meaning immediately in the minutes and hours and the day that you do that exercise, as well as in the long-term, in the days and hours and the day that you do that exercise, as well as in the long-term, in the days, weeks, and months after you perform that exercise. And of course, if you're exercising regularly, the effects of exercise on brain health and performance compound over time, making you better able to learn things, better able to retain information from the past, and indeed to expand your brain's capacity to learn new types of information in new ways. In researching today's episode, I quickly came to realize that the number of studies that have explored the relationship between exercise, brain performance, and brain health, as well as the range of different types of exercise that have been explored in that context is extremely vast. There are literally tens of thousands of studies on this topic, as well as meta-analyses and reviews, all of which point to positive effects of doing exercise of various types on brain health and performance. Within those many, many studies, you'll find many, many different exercise protocols that lead to improvements in brain performance and longevity. So the goal of today's episode is to synthesize that vast amount of information into a logical framework that simplifies it and clarifies it and places it within the context of specific mechanisms, both neurobiological mechanisms and endocrine-based mechanisms that together can very well explain the data on how exercise impacts brain health and longevity, such that by the end of today's episode, you'll have both some specific recommendations about how to use exercise for sake of brain health and performance that I believe will be new to most of you, as well as the ability to think about the mechanisms and the logical framework that wraps around this incredibly large literature on exercise and brain performance so that you can customize your large literature on exercise and brain performance, so that you can customize your exercise program on the basis of how much time you have available, your specific age, your health status, and the specific types of brain changes that you might be seeking through the use of exercise. And I should also say that by learning how exercise impacts brain performance and brain health, you're also going to learn some of the incredible ways that your body communicates with your brain and your brain communicates with your body, not just during exercise, but all of the time. So today you're going to learn a lot of practical tools, of course, about exercise, brain health, and longevity. It's based on research that is incredibly interesting, in some cases, surprising, and in almost all cases, actionable. As some of you may already know, I have a book coming out this year, 2025, entitled Protocols, an Operating Manual for the Human Body. I'm super excited about the book. It includes protocols, that is, actionable steps that anyone can take to improve their sleep, motivation, creativity, gut microbiome, nutrition, exercise, stress modulation, and much more. Now, the book was originally scheduled to be released in April of 2025. However, to make sure that the book reflects the latest scientific research, I've decided to expand on the, yes, already finished version of the book to make sure that the protocols are as up to date as possible and reflect the most modern and best findings. So the new release date for protocols is going to be September of 2025. I do apologize for the delay in release, but I assure you that I will make it worth your wait. To learn more about the book or to secure a copy by presale, go to protocolsbook.com. There you'll find all the information about the book, as well as the various languages that the book will be translated into. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is BetterHelp. BetterHelp offers professional therapy with a licensed therapist carried out entirely online. Now I've been doing weekly therapy for well over 30 years. Therapy is an extremely important component to overall health. In fact, I consider doing regular therapy just as important as getting regular exercise. Now there are essentially three things that great therapy provides. First, it provides a good rapport with somebody that you can really trust and talk to about any and all issues that concern you. Second of all, great therapy provides support in the form of emotional support, but also directed guidance, the do's and the not to do's. And third, expert therapy can help you arrive at useful insights that you would not have arrived at otherwise. Insights that allow you to do better, not just in your emotional life, in your relationship life, but also the relationship to yourself and your professional life and all sorts of career goals. With BetterHelp, they make it very easy to find an expert therapist with whom you can really resonate with and provide you with these three benefits that I described. Also, because BetterHelp is carried out entirely online, it's very time efficient and easy to fit into a busy schedule with no commuting to a therapist's office or sitting in a waiting room or looking for a parking spot. So if you'd like to try BetterHelp, go to betterhelp.com slash Huberman to get 10% off your first month. Again, that's betterhelp.com slash Huberman. Today's episode is also brought to us by Helix Sleep. Helix Sleep makes mattresses and pillows that are customized to your unique sleep needs. Now I've spoken many times before on this and other podcasts about the fact that getting a great night's sleep is the foundation of mental health, physical health, and performance. Now the mattress you sleep on makes a huge difference in the quality of sleep that you get each night. How soft that mattress is or how firm it is, how breathable it is, all play into your comfort and need to be tailored to your unique sleep needs. So if you go to the Helix website, you can take a brief two minute quiz that asks you questions such as, do you sleep on your back, your side, or your stomach? Do you tend to run hot or cold during the night? Things of that sort. Maybe you know the answers to those questions, maybe you don't. Either way, Helix will match you to the ideal mattress for you. For me, that turned out to be the Dusk mattress, D-U-S-K. I started sleeping on a Dusk mattress about three and a half years ago, and it's been far and away the best sleep that I've ever had. So much so that when I travel to hotels and Airbnbs, I find I don't sleep as well. I can't wait to get back to my dusk mattress. So if you'd like to try Helix, you can go to helixsleep.com slash Huberman. Take that two-minute sleep quiz and Helix will match you to a mattress that's customized for your unique sleep needs. Right now, Helix is giving up to 25% off all mattress orders. Again, that's helixsleep.com slash Huberman to get up to 25% off. Okay, let's talk about the relationship between exercise, brain health and longevity and performance. And let's just take a couple of minutes and really clearly define what we mean by exercise, because most of us have a concept of what exercise is, but for sake of understanding the relationship between exercise and brain performance, most of the peer reviewed studies focus on two general categories of exercise, either cardiovascular exercise or resistance training. Now, of course, cardiovascular exercise can be a very short duration, high intensity. So getting heart rates up way, way, way up, or longer duration, lower intensity. Now, typically, the amount of time scales with that, so the shorter intensity stuff tends to be quick bouts of either 30-second, 60-second, sometimes two-minute, or even four-minute all-out effort with some period of rest afterwards, or longer duration, 20, 30, 45, or even 60 minutes of cardiovascular training at a more steady state, lower intensity. And I should mention that within the tens of thousands of studies that are out there exploring the relationship between exercise and brain health and longevity, you will mostly see studies focused on cardiovascular exercise. And most of those studies early on were focused on the longer duration, lower intensity stuff. So typically 30 to 60 minutes of lower intensity, yet still elevating the heart rate exercise. Nowadays, there's more of a focus on the high intensity interval training. And today we're even going to hear about some studies that involve very, very short bursts, so-called sprints of activity, as short as six seconds long, followed by a period of rest repeated for a number of times and exploring what the effect of that sort of, I should say, very, very short intensity exercise is on immediate and long-term brain health and performance. Okay, so cardiovascular training of different durations and intensities involving different durations of rest are one category that we're going to talk about today. The other category of exercise we're going to talk about today is resistance training. Now, most of the studies involving resistance training and their effects on the brain, both brain longevity and brain performance, focus on either compounds, so multi-joint movements, so think squats, deadlifts, bench press, shoulder press, dips, et cetera. But very often, and this is just a byproduct of how studies are done in the laboratory, very often the exploration of the relationship between resistance training and brain health and longevity are single joint isolation exercises, like a single leg leg extension even. You might be thinking, wait, just one leg doing the leg extension? Yes. The reason for that, and I spoke to some of the scientists that do this sort of work, is that when they have subjects do a, say seated single leg leg extension as the form of resistance training, I know I and some of you are probably chuckling, like really of all the things you could select to see if it impacts brain health, you're going to have people kick up one knee. Yep, you do that. Why? Well, most people can do that type of movement. It doesn't take any training or it just takes a little bit of direction as to how to do it. So it can be done reasonably safely by many people, including people that are non athletes, often older than 65 years old. Not that there aren't some very fit 65 year olds, but just people who are older than 65, but don't have a lot of athletic background, can sit down in a chair, put the pin at the appropriate weight and move their knee or rather elevate their foot while seated in a chair, so-called single leg leg extension. And also it gives the benefit of the opposite leg within subject control for comparison in terms of strength increases."

Norepinephrine from exercise creates arousal that enhances learning — but don't overdo it

Six-second all-out sprints with one minute rest between significantly improve cognitive performance. But two intense sessions in one day reduces cerebral blood flow for learning afterward.

"As well, 20 or 30 minutes of so-called steady state cardio, you know, figuring out how fast you can run or row or swim or stationary bike for 20 to 30 minutes at a steady state. And then you analyze people's cognitive performance on a memory task can be a working memory task. So remembering a short string of numbers, or it could be math problems. It could be the Stroop task. Any number of different tasks reveal the same thing, which is that the longer duration, lower intensity cardio also significantly improves performance. Now, does that mean that you can do six rounds of six seconds of sprinting with a minute in between or 20 minutes of cardiovascular exercise and get the same effect on brain performance? Well, if you're just looking at overall improvements in performance, so for instance, the percentage of information that you learn, if you do or you don't do the exercise, or if you compare those two forms of exercise that I just mentioned, in that sense, yes, it really doesn't make a difference, which may have you scratching your head, but in a few moments, I'll explain why that is. On the other hand, different forms of exercise, of course, impact our bodily health differently. Higher intensity, shorter duration exercise, of course, impacts things like VO2 max and which circulating hormones and neuromodulators are going to be present very differently than longer duration, lower intensity exercise. So too, if you have people do single joint isolation resistance training exercises, like a single leg leg extension or both legs leg extension versus 10 sets of 10 in a squat exercise, you're going to see very different specific adaptations at the physical level, at the bodily level. But in every case where you explore the acute, the immediate changes that occur in brain output and function after people do that sort of exercise, you're going to see significant increases. When one does physical exercise, short duration, high intensity, cardio, or higher intensity resistance training, single joint training, compound training, single joint isolation exercises, compound exercises, one sees these increases in brain performance, at least acutely in the immediate stage after the training. So we have to ask ourselves, why is it, how is it that all these different forms of exercise are positively impacting brain performance? And the answer is very simple. And fortunately gives us tremendous leverage over our exercise and how to impact our brain health. And the answer is arousal. However, the answer isn't entirely arousal, meaning not all of the positive effects of exercise on brain health, longevity, and performance can be explained by arousal. But when I step back from the literature, again, an enormous literature, tens of thousands of peer-reviewed papers, many of which are done exceptionally well, by the way, as well as meta-analyses and reviews, I think it's fair to say that probably 60 to 70% of the effects of exercise on brain health performance and longevity can be explained by the specific shifts in our physiology, both bodily physiology and directly within the brain's physiology during those bouts of exercise, which is this increase in so-called autonomic arousal, which occurs during the exercise, but also extends into a window after the exercise is completed. So we have to talk about this relationship between exercise, arousal, and acute brain performance, meaning the improvements in brain performance that happen immediately after the exercise. And then we'll shift our focus to the effects of exercise that occur more chronically. That is the effects of exercise on brain health and performance that occur in the hours, days, weeks, and years after we exercise, even if we are continuing to exercise every day or three times a week or whatever the frequency might be. But this issue of arousal is extremely important and I assure you it's not trivial. In fact, it will help you understand a number of things in the domains of deliberate cold exposure, stress, trauma, and most importantly for today's discussion, it will help you design an exercise program that's geared towards giving you the maximum bodily health effects and the maximum brain health effects. Okay, in order to understand the relationship between exercise, arousal, and learning, we have to really clarify the relationship between arousal and learning. That's going to set the stage for pretty much everything else we're going to talk about for the next 10 minutes or so. And it's oh, so cool. It also gives me the opportunity to review a paper that I've long loved, which comes from Larry Cahill's group down at UC Irvine entitled Enhanced Memory Consolidation with Post-Learning Stress, Interaction with the Degree of Arousal at Encoding. This is just one of several papers from the Cahill group, which essentially identified the following."

Two HIIT sessions in one day tanks your cerebral blood flow for learning

Doing two high-intensity sessions in one day reduces cerebral blood flow when you try to learn afterward. One intense session improves cognition; two sessions depletes the brain's capacity.

"There is such a thing as too much arousal from exercise that leads to troughs in arousal that diminish cognitive performance and learning."

All high-intensity exercise supports long-term brain function — the chronic benefits are undisputed

While acute over-exercise can impair immediate cognition, all high-intensity exercise and resistance training supports brain function in the long-term. The chronic benefits are consistent across the literature.

"All high-intensity exercise and resistance training is going to support brain function in the chronic sense, in the long-term sense. The literature points to that."

Lactate from intense exercise strengthens the blood-brain barrier and suppresses appetite

Lactate from intense exercise fuels neurons (sparing glucose for later learning), suppresses appetite via hypothalamus signaling, and stimulates VEGF to strengthen the blood-brain barrier — critical because BBB breakdown accelerates Alzheimer's.

"Well, that may be true, but it's also true that if you exercise really, really hard and then you hydrate well and you wait a little while, oftentimes that hunger will subside. I'm not saying that you should starve yourself after exercise, fuel as needed for you. If you're an intermittent faster, do that thing. If you like to eat right after you exercise, do that. Do what's best for you, but understand that lactate has powerful effects on our appetite because why? Because lactate has powerful effects, not just on our body, but on our brain. And it is able to impact the activity of neurons in our so-called hypothalamus, little marble-sized region above the roof of our mouth that contains some of the neurons that control our appetite and our degree of satiety. So the point here is that lactate is a molecule produced in the body that can actually signal to the brain. Most of you perhaps have heard that lactate can be used as a fuel for neurons. During exercise, lactate is the preferred fuel for neurons under most circumstances, especially under circumstances of intense exercise, that spares glucose for other things, including for cognitive work later on. This is perhaps one of the reasons why when people do intense exercise, provided it's not too long and too intense, and then you go to learn something, you have enhanced focus. It's because of the arousal we've been talking about all along today, but it's also because we believe that there's glucose, there's fuel that's been spared that then can be used by the neurons because during the exercise, you weren't using quite as much glucose, you were using lactate. Now, lactate is also a stimulus for something called the blood-brain barrier, which is made up of endothelial cells, specialized endothelial cells that act as a barrier so that certain things, in particular large molecules, can't cross from the body into the brain. Lactate stimulates the release of something called VEGF, V-G-E-F, which is basically an endothelial growth factor that promotes the stability and growth of the blood brain barrier. This is very important in the context of brain health and longevity and longevity in particular, because one of the major features of age-related cognitive decline, and one that's greatly exacerbated in Alzheimer's is a breakdown of the blood brain barrier. So the integrity, the structure and function of the blood-brain barrier is something that's very important and related to brain health. And exercise that's intense enough to produce lactate causes the increase in VEGF that acts on and within the endothelial cells to improve the integrity of the blood-brain barrier. And because I mentioned the astrocytes earlier and because I did my postdoc with somebody that was sort of famous for popularizing the study of astrocytes when no one else wanted to study the astrocytes. Now everybody studies the astrocytes, but I have to mention something about astrocytes, which no, they're not just a support cell. Certain types of cells in the brain are called glia. The glia come in multiple forms, oligodendrocytes in the periphery, they're called Schwann cells, but then you also have astrocytes and astrocytes sit around the synapse. They unsheathe synapses. Remember synapses are the communication points between neurons and the astrocytes are beautifully positioned to read out the amount of activity that's occurring between neurons and produce fuel for those neurons. So the astrocytes mainly use glucose for fuel, but they can produce lactate. So again, we have this activity dependent phenomenon. That is when certain neurons are very, very active, the astrocytes are able to produce more lactate. The neurons can use lactate, spares glucose, and a bunch of great things happen. When I say great things happen, I mean in the context of the ways that exercise can improve brain function because those elevated levels of lactate in turn also increase BDNF. We already talked about the blood brain barrier. Basically the muscles producing lactate is terrific, but the astrocytes producing lactate for the neurons to feed on is also terrific because lactate can be used as a fuel and it triggers all these downstream or subsequent mechanisms, including BDNF. So basically what we're talking about is the lots and lots of ways that exercise improves brain health in the long-term, BDNF, brain plasticity, stability of synapses, and so forth, maybe even new neurons, maybe. Not a lot of evidence for that in humans yet, frankly, but maybe. And exercise can improve brain function in the short term through mechanisms of arousal, but also through alternate fuel usage, such as lactate from the body and from cells within the brain that we call the astrocytes and the release of all sorts of other things, IGF-1 to promote more vasculature and on and on and on. It's really quite beautiful, the sort of wave front of molecules and neural pathways that's initiated when we exercise, provided we exercise intensely enough. So this is a double and triple call for including at least some high intensity interval training, VO2 max type training each week, as well as doing resistance training. And of course, the long duration cardiovascular training, the sort of 30 or 45 or 60 minute, or maybe even two hours zone two type stuff. You can look up zone two, but it's basically a level of cardiovascular training that still allows you to talk, but were you to go any more intensely, you wouldn't be able to complete sentences."

Huberman's exercise protocol: zone 2 + HIIT + time-under-tension resistance training

The three pillars are zone 2 cardio, high-intensity interval training at least once per week, and time-under-tension resistance training that emphasizes slow controlled reps to engage the upper motor neuron pathway.

"And it might sound like a lot, but when you look at that foundational fitness protocol, what you realize is that some of the workouts are really, really short. Some of them are a little bit longer. None of them are longer than an hour. So it's pretty reasonable to do. And I certainly did it while working, well, to be frank, extremely long hours for many, many years. So provided your sleep is intact and other areas of your life are dialed in with stress, et cetera, etc should be doable for most everybody but modify it according to what you need or if you're doing something completely different more power to you i just want you to know that's available as a zero cost resource if you want to check it out with all of that said whatever exercise you happen to be doing or you happen to be planning. I do believe it should include four things specifically to improve brain health and performance. Although these four things will also benefit you at the level of your bodily health, no doubt. The first thing is to include at least one workout per week that is of a long, slow distance nature. So zone two type cardio, maybe you get a little bit up into zone three, but basically jogging, swimming, rowing, any activity that you can carry out consistently for 45 to 75 minutes without getting injured, right? People always say, well, do I have to run? No, if you don't like running and running's too hard on your body or you'll get injured, then do something else. Maybe you do the rower, maybe you ride a stationary bike, maybe you ride a road bike. For me, it's jogging, maybe you ride a road bike. For me, it's jogging generally or hiking with a weight vest. Those are the things that I enjoy and that I can do without getting injured. But for other people, it's a different exercise. But at least one long, slow distance training session per week is going to be very beneficial for brain health because of the way that it impacts cerebral blood flow and athelial health, and basically the way that cardiovascular health improves brain function at the level of blood flow, fuel delivery, et cetera. The second thing is to include at least one workout per week that's of the so-called high-intensity interval training type. Now, there are a lot of different types of high-intensity interval training out there. In fact, Dr. Andy Galpin says, you know, we'll hear about say like the four by four by four protocol, right? Four minutes of going as hard as you can for four minutes, basically where there's no variation in the intensity through that whole four minutes, you're going hard the whole four minutes, but only as hard as you can for the entire four minutes, then resting four minutes, and then repeating that four by four cycle four times. Okay, so that's one way to do it. But Dr. Andy Yalpin would be the first to tell you that you'd probably also get great results from a three by three by four type of workout or a six by six by six type of workout. Although for many people, that's going to be too much and too intense. Or if you're me and you prefer a high intensity interval training session that is more like a two minutes on as hard as you can go for two minutes and then rest for say three to four minutes and then repeat maybe four times, maybe five times, well then do that. I have a high intensity interval training session that I do when I'm very limited on time, which involves getting on the airdyne bike. They sometimes call the assault bike. There's a lot of resistance has that fan, which I always thought was to cool me off. But then, you know, once I actually got on one and started riding, I realized that that's to provide resistance. So, but basically if I'm limited on time, I'll hop on there, I'll pedal for about a minute or two, just kind of warm up. And then I'll go all out for a minute, rest for 30 seconds, all out for a minute, rest for 30 seconds. The first three or four of those cycles, feeling pretty good. By the seventh and eighth one, I'm praying. And generally when one finishes that type of workout, your heart rate is very, very elevated. Now, I don't tend to track my heart rate during exercise. Perhaps I should, but I don't like to get too weighed down with technology when I exercise. I like to go more on feel, that's just me."

Time-under-tension training engages brain-to-muscle pathways that boost neuroplasticity

Slow, controlled resistance training with time under tension engages upper motor neuron pathways and releases muscle-derived signals into the bloodstream. Pick exercises you can do safely to avoid injury, which is the fastest way to lose brain health.

"One way to really limit your brain health is to get injured and not be able to exercise. It's not that long before that starts to negatively impact your brain health."

Anterior mid-cingulate cortex: doing hard things you hate builds your willpower brain region

The anterior mid-cingulate cortex grows when you do things you genuinely don't want to do. Stimulating it increases the will to persevere. For Huberman, cold exposure is the tool because he hates the cold.

"Anterior mid-cingulate cortex stimulation increases the will to persevere. I do deliberate cold exposure because I hate it, and by doing it I'm activating my willpower."