Your Brain on Exercise

by Gary L. Wenk

Acclaimed neuroscientist Gary Wenk reveals the fascinating impacts of exercise on the brain

Decades of research demonstrate that regular modest levels of exercise improve heart and lung function and may relieve joint pain. Regular daily exercise will help your body to regulate blood sugar levels and reduce inflammation, and many of these benefits are a consequence of reducing the amount of body fat you carry around. Your body clearly benefits in many ways from regular exercise. Does your brain benefit as well? Does regular exercise positively affect brain function? Does our thinking become faster because we exercise? Does running a marathon make us smarter? Dr. Gary Wenk's goal is to provide a realistic perspective on what benefits your brain should expect to achieve from exercise. Your Brain on Exercise skillfully blends scholarship with illuminating insights and clarity. Without requiring any specialized knowledge about the brain, Your Brain on Exercise entertainingly illustrates the intersection between brain health, the consequences of exercise, and our need to eat in an
entirely new light. An internationally renowned neuroscientist and medical researcher, Dr. Wenk has been educating college and medical students about the brain and lecturing around the world for more than forty years.

Genres: Nonfiction, Health

208 pages, Hardcover

Published April 1, 2021

About the author

Gary L. Wenk is a Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience and Molecular Virology, Immunology and Medical Genetics at the Ohio State University.

Reviews

[Sophie Tonet · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 ⭐️ This book is basically one giant literature review that’s a bit heavier on the biochem than I would have liked. However, nothing in this book was at all what I thought was going to come of it. There’s a line in the book, which I wish I dog eared now, that goes something like ‘scientists have a hard time believing their evidence doesn’t support our assumptions about exercise’. I, too, would have thought that exercise is paramount to cognitive status and actually had a hard time coming to terms with a lot of the evidence reviewed here too. But the best thing to come of this book was the idea that I can take the pressure off myself to do hard workouts, all you need to do is walk. Although it’s heavy on the sciencey jargon and terms if you didn’t take university physiology, this book’s a real think piece into our assumptions about the exercise-brain connection.

[Peter Zhang · Rating 1 out of 5]

bleh so dry. the thesis is the null hypothesis. there is no significant benefit of exercise on the brain. so boring. although i guess we should publish more null results