Pain is in the brain

This is a superb video.  If you follow Todd Hargrove's blog this will not be new, but it is well presented.



via BSMPG

The Aging Brain

This is interesting

Presented by: Term Life Insurance Resource

Exercise is good for older brains

Continuing the theme of keeping older brains healthy....I've had stuff before on how exercise increases insulin sensitivity (which we saw was a good thing) and how resistance training benefits older people.  Now this study which sees better brain performance in the elderly following intense exercise.

Acute moderate exercise enhances compensatory brain activation in older adults.

Exercise and brain health : just sprint for new mitochondria?

This is an interesting looking study (full text here)

Exercise training increases mitochondrial biogenesis in the brain

These findings suggest that exercise training increases brain mitochondrial biogenesis, which may have important implications, not only with regard to fatigue, but also with respect to various central nervous system diseases and age-related dementia that are often characterized by mitochondrial dysfunction.

Exercise training causes new mitochondria to grow in the muscles.  Mitochondria are fascinating, almost parasitic cells within our cells that now act as “power plants” that use oxygen and glucose to produce ATP, the energy currency of the cell.  Endurance gets better, since you are enabled to keep the muscles aerobically fuelled for longer.  By the way it is not just endurance training that does this, Gibala just this year has shown that sprint training also causes mitochondrial biogenesis.  An acute bout of high-intensity interval training increases the nuclear abundance of PGC-1α and activates mitochondrial biogenesis in human skeletal muscle.

The adaptations are mainly in the muscles you are exercising  but it is not just your muscles that need power.  The brain has a massive demand for oxygen and glucose, even at rest. (We could get into the Perfect Health Diet here which recommends a basic level of glucose intake mainly from toxin free starch to provide the basic level glucose that the brain needs, so you do not need to break down protein to provide it)


Interesting too that the study used endurance exercise.  I wonder what the findings would have been  with resistance training?  I reckon based on Gibala's work that sprints would give the same benefits.....maybe without the wear and tear of endurance work.

The press release adds more:

These findings suggest that exercise training increases the number of mitochondria in the brain much like it increases mitochondria in muscles. The study authors note that this increase in brain mitochondria may play a role in boosting exercise endurance by making the brain more resistant to fatigue, which can affect physical performance. They also suggest that this boost in brain mitochondria could have clinical implications for mental disorders, making exercise a potential treatment for psychiatric disorders, genetic disorders, and neurodegenerative diseases.

Speaking as someone with a father who has dementia, the mention of that condition always makes me pay attention.

Eric Cobb on Pain

A nice little video.  This ties in a lot with the material  that Todd has had  on pain, and with the stuff I've been thinking through on neuroplasticity. 

More on neuroplasticity

Golf Changes the Brain

A mere 40 hours of golf training, by middle-aged novices, led to increases in gray matter in parts of the brain involved in visual processing and motor coordination, a new study has found. The experiment stood out, among other reasons, for the informal way test subjects were allowed to pursue the training—outside the lab, on their own schedule—and it reaffirmed the plasticity of the mature brain.

 I am still finding the neuroplasticity work and its implications absolutely fascinating.  That is why I am trying to learn to juggle!   (There is a related idea here too - musicians have better hearing)

Learning to move

Todd Hargrove posted this amazing video the other day and I just wanted to call attention to it and the things that it teaches.  Todd's own material on learning how to move is definitely worth buying and learning from, taking some of these basic principles and influenced very much by Feldenkrais.



Note that Todd didn't do this video - it was created by Irene Gutteridge, a Feldenkrais practitioner and filmmaker.

In the session I had with Erwan Le Corre last year there was a section on rolling and perceiving your weight and points of contact with the ground.  All this is very MovNat. 


Watching this I can see where many of the ideas in Becoming Bulletproof came from.  They are big on rolling and crawling as foundational moves which also have profound impact on the brain.

More and more recently I am becoming fascinated by the brain, neuroplasticity and its role in our movement, health and perception.  There is more to come on this.

Strength as skill

"Strength is a skill". 

That has almost become a cliche, particularly around the kettlebell community, but there is much truth in this simple sentence. 

I first same across this idea when Clarence Bass introduce Pavel's idea of synaptic facilitation, that so much of strength is neurological, an idea that Pavel expounded in his article Greasing the Groove (pdf)

Of course this is related to the ideas of Z health too (check out the material here) and Todd Hargrove had a great post the other day on the brain's impact on strength. 

Linked to all of this I received a fascinating email this morning from Bill who often comments on the blog.  It explains his experience of how practice makes him stronger.  I'll post it all here and would be really interested in your comments of thoughts:

Your recent articles on Z-Health and other neurological aspects of improving performance reminded me of an experiment I did about 6 months ago.  First a little background.

I'm building an experimental airplane, and was fastening parts with a rivet squeezer and noticed something strange.  The rivet hand squeezer is setup to squeeze a solid aluminum rivet to a specific size, and once setup correctly the force required to set each rivet in a row of rivets is identical.  Squeezing them is relatively difficult.  First the squeezer handles (about 18" long) are squeezed with one hand to start setting the rivet, then the other hand is added above that (further out on the handles where there is more leverage) and the rivet begins to compress.  As it compresses, it becomes more difficult and the hand closes to the pivot point of the handles is then moved to the end of the handles and both hands are used to squeeze until the handles touch.

So each rivet requires identical force, and an identical amount of work is done each time.  Long lead in, but here's the thing I discovered:  After riveting for approximately 10 minutes at the rate of 3-5 rivets/minute I noticed it suddenly became easier to squeeze the handles to completion.  The first time it happened I feared the settings on the squeezer had gotten bumped and I was no longer squeezing the rivet to the same depth, but a quick check showed that not to be the case.  For some reason, it suddenly became easier or my perception of the difficult changed.

The rest of the rivets set during that session all felt easy.  The effect was profound enough that I watched for it the next time I riveted, and between 10 and 15 minutes in I suddenly noticed the change again.  The change is SUDDEN.  40-60 rivets are drive with difficulty, and then suddenly the next rivet is easy and all subsequent rivets feel easy.  There is no change to the squeezer, it's as simple as a pair of pliers.

So I began to wonder if there was something chemical (ATP, mitochondrial, etc.) or neurological that was happening to change the real or perceived level of difficulty.  I decided to experiment with a larger movement, and went into my CrossFit gym early to play.

My one rep max deadlift at that time was 405, so I picked just over 60% as my starting point and loaded up a bar with 255 and grabbed a stopwatch.  I decided to do a deadlift every 15 seconds for 15 minutes or until I noticed the change I noticed when riveting.  Talk about a boring workout! 

For the next 12 minutes I pulled 255 off the ground every 15 seconds and dropped it.  I had just about given up, when the pull at 12:30 suddenly felt easier.  It was just as sudden and just as profound as what I had experienced riveting.  So much so that I took at break at 14:00 and started adding weight to the bar.  I added weight every 2-4 pulls and spent minutes 17-19 doing a deadlift every 15 seconds at 365. 

I was shocked and googled to see if anyone had research in this area but came up empty.  I mentioned it to a fellow CrossFitter, who thought it sounded very weird.  But I talked him into doing it with me the following week so we committed to doing deadlifts every 15 seconds with 265 for 15 minutes.  I noticed the sudden shift on the rep at 12:15 this time.  I didn't say anything, and my workout partner suddenly looked up in shock when he did his rep at 13:30.  He said he thought I was full of crap, but he agreed it suddenly got easier.  We just kept going until 15 minutes and he agreed all the deadlifts for him after that point felt easier than all of the reps leading up to it.

Since then I have done it a few more times with additional weight and have also tested it with everything from strict presses to front squats to weighted pullups.  The effect occurs for me between 10 and 12 minutes consistently.  I've also gone from a 1 rep 405 to triples at 415 on the deadlift.  FWIW, my 405 max was at a bodyweight of 205.  My 415 triple is at a current bodyweight of 190.

So, I keep looking for some Z-Health type of approach to understanding what causes this to happen, and how it could be leveraged for greater performance.  Since you're clearly enjoying your research in this area I figured I would send it your way.  It's an easy thing to play with if you're curious, though I don't know if it has any value beyond an interesting observation.

Take care, and let me know if you have any thoughts on this or decide to experiment with it.

Z Health - more on Brain Health and movement

 The report that he is talking about is here by the way






by the way, I wonder if neck packing works do to the arthokinetic reflex?

mc has a post here that makes me think that that may be so

The interview that I did with mc has a good overview of Z Health too

Exercise Training & Brain Health

In the past I've posted a few things about exercise and brain health, not least the work of John Ratey, and his book Spark.   I can't remember if I've posted it but there is also the work of Kelly Lambert who looks tmovement in terms of addressing depression.

Anyway, I saw this mentioned on Twitter the other day:


Exercise Training Increases Mitochondrial Biogenesis in the Brain.

Exercise training increases brain mitochondrial biogenesis which may have important implications, not only with regard to fatigue, but also with respect to various central nervous system diseases and age-related dementia that are often characterized by mitochondrial dysfunction.

John Ratey on Exercise and the Brain

Exercise and Immunity and the brain

Paul Jaminet at the Perfect Health Diet has talked a bit about infection and the impact on the brain. 

This is an interesting report of how:

a small amount of exercise shields older animals from memory loss following a bacterial infection, according to a study in the August 10 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience. The findings suggest moderate exercise may lead to several changes in the brain that boost its ability to protect itself during aging — a period of increased vulnerability.

Here is the abstract

We have previously found that healthy aged rats are more likely to suffer profound memory impairments following a severe bacterial infection than are younger adult rats. Such a peripheral challenge is capable of producing a neuroinflammatory response, and in the aged brain this response is exaggerated and prolonged. Normal aging primes, or sensitizes, microglia, and this appears to be the source of this amplified inflammatory response. Among the outcomes of this exaggerated neuroinflammatory response are impairments in synaptic plasticity and reductions of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), both of which have been associated with cognitive impairments. Since it has been shown that physical exercise increases BDNF mRNA in the hippocampus, the present study examined voluntary exercise in 24-month-old F344×BN rats as a neuroprotective therapeutic in our bacterial infection model. Although aged rats ran only an average of 0.7 km per week, this small amount of exercise was sufficient to completely reverse infection-induced impairments in hippocampus-dependent long-term memory compared with sedentary animals. Strikingly, exercise prevented the infection-induced exaggerated neuroinflammatory response and the blunted BDNF mRNA induction seen in the hippocampus of sedentary rats. Moreover, voluntary exercise abrogated age-related microglial sensitization, suggesting a possible mechanism for exercise-induced neuroprotection in aging.

More on brain maps - not good at height

I think I've mentioned before the idea of brain maps.  mc started wrote about this a while ago and pointed me towards the book - The Body has a Mind of its Own

There was a good discussion of the ideas at Paul's Perfect Health Diet blog too recently, with something from Todd Hargrove and a good follow up discussion

It is also a topic on which the excellent Becoming Bulletproof is built. 

Anyway, I spotted this interesting report on how brain maps - at least in rats - are pretty flat.  They are not good at estimating their position with respect to height. 

Read more here

Animal's brains are only roughly aware of how high-up they are in space, meaning that in terms of altitude the brain's 'map' of space is surprisingly flat, according to new research.

In a study published online today in Nature Neuroscience, scientists studied cells in or near a part of the brain called the hippocampus, which forms the brain's map of space, to see whether they were activated when rats climbed upwards.

The study, supported by the Wellcome Trust, looked at two types of cells known to be involved in the brain's representation of space: grid cells, which measure distance, and place cells, which indicate location. Scientists found that only place cells were sensitive to the animal moving upwards in altitude, and even then only weakly so.

Exercise and Brain Health

I've pointed to material like this before - e.g. the post on Ratey's book Spark - but the post on Paul's Perfect Health Diet blog on joint mobility got me thinking about it again.   It is worth reading and I've put a few comments on the post

There was a good review paper recently about the evidence for the relationships between physical activity and exercise and the brain and cognition.  The full paper is avalable.  Interesting stuff.

It also links to the ideas of the excellent book The Body Has a Mind of Its Own which I might have mentioned previously, a superb book that mc pointed me towards.

I should also mention that Becoming Bulletproof provides a nice explanation of these ideas too.

Becoming Bulletproof

I saw this ebook by Tim Anderson
and Mike McNiff mentioned in a post by Dan John  I have great respect for Dan so I stumped up the $7 via Paypal and got myself a copy of Becoming Bulletproof. 

Somes I get a bit fed up by the macho rhetoric that can be applied to training books - they want us all to be renegade....tactical.....warriors.....men among men......but in this case bulletproof just means resilient, maintaining function.

I am very impressed.  It is a relatively quick read but there is a lot of material in here.  It ties in some ideas from several sources that I have pointed to over the years and binds them together around some simple concepts and movements.

If you have followed some of the people and concepts that I have pointed to over the years you will recognise much of the ideas, but there were new things to me and the basic simple set of moves that they recommend are almost obvious given the conceptual framework that they build.

There are elements here that are similar to things I've read from Z health, Gray Cook, Pavel and others as well as the fascinating ideas of neuroplasticity that I have read about in Spark which I head about from Frank Forencich (who I interviewed here)

I would also say that the neuroplasticity ideas that they explain makes sense of some of the whole MovNat approach of Erwan Le Corre.

Anyway I do not want to give too much away, but I totally recommend this book.  Check it out.

So now fat people are more stoopid?

Here is an interesting one.  I've watched a couple of important people in my life decline markedly through various types of dementia recently.  It is really sad to see once vibrant intelligent people so limited by changes in their brains.

Insulin Sensitivity as a Mediator of the Relationship Between BMI and Working Memory-Related Brain Activation

This study has a simple conclusions:  obesity in middle age was related to alterations in brain activation during a cognitive challenge and this association appeared to be mediated by insulin sensitivity.

Insulin sensitivity again.  What can we do to maintain insulin sensitivity?  It is all the regular stuff - low carb/paleo diet, sensible exercise, adequate sleep, minimal chronic stress.....

Exercise and brain function

This was interesting. I've pointed to similar things before - e.g. the post on Spark and the follow up one.

moderate exercise – in this case walking at one's own pace for 40 minutes three times a week – can enhance the connectivity of important brain circuits, combat declines in brain function associated with aging and increase performance on cognitive tasks.

The higher the connectivity, the better the performance on cognitive tasks, especially the ones we call executive control tasks – things like planning, scheduling, dealing with ambiguity, working memory and multitasking," Kramer said. These are the very skills that tend to decline with aging, he said.

There is more in the report here and the full study (pdf) is available from the link below:

Plasticity of brain networks in a randomized intervention trial of exercise training in older adults

More on Brain Health

Further to the Spark posts a few days ago, here is another study that exercise promotes brain health. This time it is not in mice (like this one was) but humans.

Implication that training promotes brain health and could treat depression. Shame they didn't test resistance training.

Endurance training enhances BDNF release from the human brain

The circulating level of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) is reduced in patients with major depression and type-2 diabetes. Because acute exercise increases BDNF production in the hippocampus and cerebral cortex, we hypothesized that endurance training would enhance the release of BDNF from the human brain as detected from arterial and internal jugular venous blood samples. In a randomized controlled study, 12 healthy sedentary males carried out 3 mo of endurance training (n = 7) or served as controls (n = 5). Before and after the intervention, blood samples were obtained at rest and during exercise. At baseline, the training group (58 ± 106 ng·100 g–1·min–1, means ± SD) and the control group (12 ± 17 ng·100 g–1·min–1) had a similar release of BDNF from the brain at rest. Three months of endurance training enhanced the resting release of BDNF to 206 ± 108 ng·100 g–1·min–1 (P < 0.05), with no significant change in the control subjects, but there was no training-induced increase in the release of BDNF during exercise. Additionally, eight mice completed a 5-wk treadmill running training protocol that increased the BDNF mRNA expression in the hippocampus (4.5 ± 1.6 vs. 1.4 ± 1.1 mRNA/ssDNA; P < 0.05), but not in the cerebral cortex (4.0 ± 1.4 vs. 4.6 ± 1.4 mRNA/ssDNA) compared with untrained mice. The increased BDNF expression in the hippocampus and the enhanced release of BDNF from the human brain following training suggest that endurance training promotes brain health.

Exercise reduces the damage done by a stroke?

Maybe. It is one more reason to train anyway.

My Dad has had a series of strokes recently and so I am interested in anything that might limit damage.

Exercise Preconditioning Reduces Neuronal Apoptosis in Stroke by Up-regulating HSP-70 (HSP-72) and ERK 1/2.

Exercise preconditioning induces neuroprotection after stroke......Our results indicate that exercise diminishes neuronal injury in stroke by up-regulating HSP-70 and ERK 1/2.

Follow up to Spark Post - Fit Teenage Boys Are Smarter But Muscle Strength Isn't the Secret, Study Shows

A couple of days ago I mentioned the book Spark that I had ordered, having read about it from Frank Forencich.

Bill De Simone commented on the post and summarised the argument:

the gist of his book is that running, swimming, etc. benefits creativity, concentration, mood, other brain aspects, more so than weight training and stretching, due to the increased blood flow to the brain. He doesn't devalue weight training/yoga/stretching, just draws a distinction between benefits. Increased heart rate alone, such as from blood pooling during weight training, isn't enough; there has to be the steady increased flow.

I just saw this study reported which seems to support that position:

In the first study to demonstrate a clear positive association between adolescent fitness and adult cognitive performance, Nancy Pedersen of the University of Southern California and colleagues in Sweden find that better cardiovascular health among teenage boys correlates to higher scores on a range of intelligence tests -- and more education and income later in life

...

In every measure of cognitive functioning they analyzed -- from verbal ability to logical performance to geometric perception to mechanical skills -- average test scores increased according to aerobic fitness.
However, scores on intelligence tests did not increase along with muscle strength, the researchers found.
"Positive associations with intelligence scores were restricted to cardiovascular fitness, not muscular strength," Pedersen explained, "supporting the notion that aerobic exercise improved cognition through the circulatory system influencing brain plasticity."

UPDATE - Donny passed on the link to th full study

Interesting stuff indeed.

On another, related, tack, I've not been doing much "cardio" (dodgy phrase) recently and felt it yesterday on a hill walk. A section that normally takes me 30 minutes took about 32.....Still the view was worth it!

If I am in the hills like this, I still need some training specific to this.