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I used to be the person who hated exercising, refused to sweat, and had no idea that my lack of moving was actually raising my body’s level of inflammation. Then I stumbled across functional medicine and its root cause approach to creating a healthy life that simultaneously prevents chronic disease, early aging, and cognitive decline.
I learned how important exercise and movement is to overall health and brain function as well as how to optimize your exercise routine for that purpose. Now I move my body every day and love it. I have an abundance of energy, no more brain fog, and just flat out feel good.
Today I’m going to share with you how exercise helps prevent early aging and cognitive decline, what you should aim for, and how to get started. I’d also like to give you a sneak peak into what my exercise routine looks like.
Please note that I am not a certified personal trainer or fitness coach. All of my advice here comes from my personal experience and functional medicine training.
Let’s dive in!
How Exercise Helps Prevent Early Aging and Cognitive Decline
Moving your body does so much good for the body it’s not even funny. I’ll get into those details in a minute, but research has also shown that sitting is actually harmful to cognitive and physical health as well. So not only is exercising good for you, the opposite isn’t neutral. It’s actually bad for you!
No pressure to get moving, huh?
Let’s get into how exercise helps keep the body young. It…
- Reduces insulin resistance, which causes inflammation, aging, and contributes to cognitive decline
- Increases ketosis, great for the brain, weight loss, and energy
- Increases BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor), which is needed for optimum brain and memory function
- Increases the size of the hippocampus = great brain function and better memory
- Improves vascular function, which is great news for you heart and blood pressure
- Reduces stress (who doesn’t need this)
- Improves sleep (ditto)
- Improves mood, which was huge for me
- Increases survival of new neurons (brain cells)
That’s a lot! This is how powerful moving your body can be.
Exercise Goals for Preventing Early Aging and Cognitive Decline
Just like with food, it’s best to do a variety of types of exercise, so you’ll want to include both aerobic exercise and strength training. Aerobic exercise options include walking, jogging, swimming, playing tennis, getting on the elliptical, yoga, and tons more. For strength training, you can incorporate lighter weights, use your own bodyweight (which is really easy to do at home or on the road), or go heavier.
Ladies, do not be afraid of the weights. You have to actively try to get bulky to look that way. I am a prime example that lifting heavy does not make you look like a man, as I’ll outline below.
Eventually, you’ll want to be doing some form of exercise at least 4-5 days per week for about 45-60 minutes total each day. Depending on your schedule, it may be better for you to knock it all out in one session or break it up in two or more shorter sessions. This is also a great way to get both aerobic and weight training in daily.
Let me be honest with you. I did not start here and neither should you. So let’s get into how to get started working towards this goal.
How to Start Exercising
Starting at 5 days of hour-long workouts will leave you beyond sore and ready to give up. That is not what you want.
Instead, I recommend starting really small. Like, smaller than you’d like to go. I’m thinking one day a week for 20 minutes or less.
It may sound ridiculous to start that small, but when you do that one session you’ll have met your goal. You’ll get that first win, get that confidence boost, know that you can do this, and be ready for the next goal.
That next goal might be, for example, twice a week for 20 minutes. Move forward slowly to collect your wins and condition your body so you prevent injuries.
Keep going like that until you’re working out for 5 days 20 minutes each day or 3 days for a hour. Then, keep going until you reach your end goal! Whichever pathway you want to move forward with is up to you, your lifestyle, and schedule. Just keep going. That’s the most important part.
There will be days and weeks that you don’t meet your goal. That’s okay. Ninety-five percent of goals are not met by linear progress. That means that only 5% of people create a new habit without any setbacks. If you meet a setback, congratulations! You’re human. Welcome to the club. I know I’ve experienced my fair share.
The difference between what I call an “exercise diet” and a lifestyle change is what you do when you “mess up.” It’s an “exercise diet” if you give up after one missed day, but it’s a lifestyle change if you realize you’re human (like me) and do better the next time.
For the workouts themselves, there are so many different things you can do. The easiest way to begin with aerobic exercising is probably walking.
Strength training may be more difficult to begin, especially if you want to use weights and since you’ll need to have good form when you perform each movement so you don’t create an injury.
Many people nowadays try to copy their favorite fitness influencer. While these influencers usually have good content, they’ve often been strength training for years. It may be better and safer to take a few classes, buy a program created by a personal trainer or fitness coach, or even hire a personal trainer for a while to teach you the basics. That way you can get individual coaching to make sure you’re learning safely.
Classes can be online or in person and cover a super wide range of activities ranging from pilates and yoga to kickboxing and CrossFit training. Find one that sounds fun and sign up for their beginner course.
To find a personal trainer, just do a quick Google search for trainers in your area or virtual trainers if you’d like to go that direction.
My Exercise Routine
As promised, I’d like to share my current exercise routine with you. This is what works for me and it may or may not work for you. Feel free to try it out and make it your own, but please read the section above and make sure you’re staying safe. Don’t just dive right in.
I workout 6 days a week – three weight training days and three days for aerobic exercise.
My weight training days are full body workouts. For the lower body portion, I include a hip thrust/bridge exercise, a squat/lunge exercise, a hinge/pull exercise, and an abduction/rotation exercise. For the upper body portion, I include one push and one pull exercise. I’ll go into more detail of what these exercises might include below, but all of them require core stabilization so sometimes I include an ab-specific exercise and sometimes I don’t. These workouts tend to last about an hour.
This way of setting up my strength training workouts came from the creator of the hip thrust, Bret Contreras. You can read all about it in his book Glute Lab. Get a copy for yourself here. I highly recommend it and use it every time I plan my next phase of workouts, which I switch up every 4 weeks to keep my muscles learning and getting stronger.
Each one of my strength training workouts begins with 5-10 minutes of dynamic stretching where I’m moving through my stretches instead of holding a stretch. An example of a dynamic stretch would be walking lunges instead of holding a lunge position.
I then end each weight training session with another 5-10 minutes of static stretching where I hold each stretch for about 30 seconds to help keep my muscles flexible and resilient.
For my aerobic days, I switch between yoga and getting on our elliptical. I’m not going to lie, the elliptical gets boring so I tend to listen to podcasts to make the time go by faster. I usually do these activities for about 30-45 minutes. I also end these workouts with 5-10 minutes of stretching.
Before I begin each and every workout, I drink my homemade pre-workout to give me a boost of energy and get my blood flowing. All I do is mix Guarana Root Extract in some water. While it doesn’t taste amazing, it doesn’t have any calories so it doesn’t break my fast and it gives me just enough energy to give my workout my all. You can check out the Guarana Root Extract here. It comes from a good quality, clean company that I trust as a pharmacist.
To bring it all together, below is a snapshot of what one of my weeks of strength training might look like. I personally don’t write down my aerobic days, but on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday I would be doing yoga or getting on the elliptical, like I talked about above.
If I can go from super couch potato to consistently working out 6 days a week, I truly believe you can too.
Now you just have to take the first step towards your optimal exercise routine to fight off early aging and cognitive decline.
Say goodbye to feeling older than you are and say hello to feeling younger all the time!
For the next step in preventing early aging and cognitive decline, check out these posts on how you can use food as medicine to create health and prevent disease.
In addition, I created a short guide on the top three things you can do to begin preventing or reversing cognitive decline, and I’d like you to have it for free. Yes, for free! All you need to do is fill out the form below and I’ll send it right over.
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