According to research, physical exercise reduces the risk of inflammatory processes in the body. For example, in an extensive study that examined the medical records of 13,478 people over the age of 20, it turned out that exercise reduces the level of C-reactive protein (CRP)— a blood plasma protein whose concentration increases with inflammation. The dependence was revealed: the more physical activity, the lower the CRP level. Only 8% of people who actively engaged in sports had elevated CRP levels, while the number of people who did not exercise but had elevated CRP levels was 21%. The positive effect of physical activity on the body is manifested at any age. A survey of 800 men and women aged 70-75 years showed that both moderate and intense physical activity correlate with low levels of CRP. Although lack of exercise negatively affects brain stem cells and their differentiation, excessive physical activity is no less harmful. And vice versa: moderate and intense physical activity promotes the development of stem cells. From this we can conclude that extremes in the form of lack of exercise or excessive amounts of exercise are equally harmful to brain health. Physical exercise should be moderate or intense. Even if a person is just thinking about physical exercise, the same neural systems are activated in the brain. A comparison was made of the effect of mental and actual exercise based on observation of the activity of the cerebral cortex and subsequent physical results. Mentally doing physical exercises not only caused a change in the brain, but also led to an improvement in actually doing the same exercises. This discovery made scientists wonder: how does the mental performance of physical exercises affect their subsequent actual performance. And scientists found that after five days of mental practice and the next two hours of actual exercise practice, the result improved as much as after five days of actual exercise! This discovery confirmed the long-held belief of sports psychologists that visualization and mental rehearsal of an athlete’s performance can enhance the effectiveness of his actual performance. And it does not depend on the type of sport. You can verify for yourself that the sooner you can imagine yourself doing something, the sooner you can actually do it. But there are certain limitations due to the fact that consciousness and the brain are two aspects of the same process. For example, if you are right-handed, it will be easier for you to imagine that you raise your right hand and actually raise your right hand than to imagine that you raise your left hand and raise it. This limitation persists even if half of a person’s body is paralyzed. He also moves his active hand faster and imagines this action. This happens because the same brain systems are activated during movement and mental representation of movement. A source: Arden J. “Taming the amygdala and other brain training tools” Photo: i.oldmedic.com