Exercising 4 Hours After Studying May Help You Retain Info Better

 In Blog, Healthy Steps

iStock_000008183124XSmallWe’ve written many blogs about how working out not only improves your body, it also improves your mind. Now a new study shows that exercise can help you retain the information you learn… as long as you do so four after you learn it.

For the study, reported in the Cell Press journal Current Biology, scientists assigned 72 people to three groups. Each group studied 90-picture location associations for about 40 minutes. One group performed 35 minutes of interval training immediately after studying, the second did the same workout four hours later, the third did not exercise at all.

Then 48-hours later, all the participants returned for a recall test. They found:

  • Performing aerobic exercise 4 hr after learning improved associative memory
  • Exercise at this time also increased hippocampal pattern similarity during retrieval
  • Exercise performed immediately after learning had no effect on memory retention
  • Exercise could have potential as a memory intervention in educational settings

This could be some very helpful information to share with all the students in your life!

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