It’s a no-brainer that working out is good for you and provides a number of physical benefits. But a new study suggests that weightlifting may have more benefits than just relieving stress and building muscle, prompting more people to incorporate such exercises into their workout routine. According to the findings, doing a hard or intense workout in the gym for as little as 20 minutes can boost your long-term memory by around 10 percent.
A group of 46 young and healthy adults were asked to remember 90 photographs that were shown to them on the computer screen. They were split in half into two different groups. One group worked out on a leg-extension exercise machine and did 50 reps. The other half of the group sat in a chair and did not exercise. Two days later the same test subjects were brought back to look at a series of 180 photographs, which also included the original 90 photos they saw.
The researchers found that the people who were in the exercise group remembered 60% of the pictures from the 90 original photos, and the people who didn’t exercise only remembered around 50% of the original photos.
Though the results had a 10% difference, they indicated that weightlifting for a short period of time had positive effects on long-term memory.
Information gathered from an article on Huffington Post.
