Intense Workouts May Badly Impact Mental Health and Memory

According to a recent study by Dartmouth College researchers, less may be more when it comes to the relationship between intensive gym workouts and mental wellness. Study participants who engaged in low-intensity exercise outperformed those who exercised vigorously on various memory tasks. Additionally, men and women who engaged in rigorous activity, as determined by their Fitbits, reported feeling more stressed than those who exercised less vigorously. “Mental health and memory are central to nearly everything we do in our everyday lives,” said lead study author Jeremy R. Manning, assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth. “Our study is trying to build a foundation for understanding how different intensities of physical exercise affect different aspects of mental and cognitive growth.” Previous studies have only looked at the impacts on memory over a relatively short time, but the Dartmouth team intended to look at the effects over a much longer time frame. They examined information obtained over a year, including daily step counts, time spent in various heart rate zones as determined by Fitbits, and other data. The participants who were more active exhibited generally greater memory. However, people who engaged in moderate exercise tended to score better on tasks requiring episodic memory, which involves recalling autobiographical events like what they ate the day before. On tests requiring spatial memory—the kind of memory, you use to remember the place, like where you parked your car—the vigorous exercisers performed better. The capacity to remember links between ideas and other memories, as well as the spatial and related memory tasks, appeared to be stronger among participants who self-reported anxiety and depression. The associative memory tests often showed lower results for participants who expressed higher levels of stress.