DOING NO EXERCISE MAY LEAD TO PREMATURE BRAIN DEGENERATION.

                                               

DOING NO  EXERCISE  MAY  LEAD  TO  PREMATURE  BRAIN  DEGENERATION.

Is exercise only for losing weight ? 

There is a huge misconception , Most people talk about losing weight , eating better, better habits, etc, but they forget the number one reason for exercising. It is for the most important part of your body, YOUR BRAIN !

The real reason you should exercise is , if you don't get regular movement, your brain will degenerate prematurely. This sounds like a pretty big statement , so in today's blog will go through some of the mechanisms that you have absolute no doubt how this works. I will help you understand that it is not possible to have optimal health without regular movement.

Degenerative brain diseases are caused by the decline and death of nerve cells called neurons. These diseases are progressive, meaning that the condition worsens over time as greater numbers of neurons in the brain die. Degenerative brain diseases include types of dementia like ALZHEMER'S disease, FRONTOTEMPORAL DEMENTIA and LEW BODY DEMENTIA.

CAUSE & EFFECT :

You may be doing all the right things - eating low carbs , eating less frequently, switching from processed food to whole food , but the one thing you are still not doing is regular EXERCISE. 

I hope myself will be able to bring across to you in this blog - How important it is , it is critical , exercise is not optional if you want to have optimum health.

Most people say that OBESITY is the problem, the general idea is obesity cause - BP, Arthritis, Diabetes etc., we have actually cause and effect mixed up. Most people think obesity is the cause of these mentioned issues. Whereas these are caused by ISULIN RESISTANCE. What has exercise to do with all this . Most doctors will tell that you need to exercise to lose weight and then all the issues will go away. It wont work that way. It will only work if you are insulin sensitive . Exercise may contribute to 5-10% in reducing the insulin resistance, but the way you will reduce insulin resistance is by eating less sugar , less carbs and less frequently. 

What I wanted to emphasis is that , exercise is not the main path to solve these problems. 

Then why exercise ?

Who Needs Exercise ? 

Let us take 3 categories :

1. Rock.

2. Plant.

3. Animal.

We humans fit in the Animal category. Brain is something that the other 2 do not have. The difference is the BRAIN. So, who needs to exercise ? the answer is "Those who have Brains need to exercise". 

Why do we at all have a brain ? 

We are conditioned to the answer that - the brain thinks. We think that thinking is the primary purpose of the brain. But that is not even close to the big picture.

What is the basic difference between you & the bunch of amoebas in a pond . You have 40 trillion cells in your body vs 40 Trillion Amoebas in a pond. They are very similar to your cellular structure . The difference is you have one organism , you have a unifying principal called NERVOUS SYSTEM. The nervous system allows your cells to be aware of each other , as a result they have a common purpose and a common goal.

The purpose of the brain is to coordinate function between those cells. To allow the cells what they need to do under different circumstances and create balance or HOMEOSTASIS.

The 2nd purpose is to coordinate movement , because now when you have a common purpose you need to able to move around and do things towards that common goal. 

A rock is not alive and do not move , so doesn't need a brain. A plant is alive but do not move so, do not need a nervous system to guide it, so do not need a brain. We humans or animals are alive and do move , so that is the purpose of  brain. Things that don't have cells that work together don't have brains.

A very appropriate example is the SEA SQUIRT. This is an interesting life form, it starts a life as an egg, then turns into a tadpole like that of a frog. This tadpole has a primitive nervous system, it has about 177 Neurons , or brain cells , it has a sensory organ (eye) to detect the environment to which it interacts and responds. It has a tail and it can move, it has every property of a tadpole or an animal. But it only has these things so that it can move about and find one place to call home. Once it selects that one place , then it settles down and never moves again . Now it becomes a plant , soon as it went from an animal to a plant , then it stops moving and does not now need a brain any more. It now gets rid of its brain, it eats it's brain or reabsorbs it's brain . 

USE IT OR LOSE IT :

This is an incredibly powerful principle. If you have a muscle, you work it out by putting some stress and tension on that muscle, then it performs some work and body is going to create some growth. The stress sends signals to the brain , that says we need to get better on this as he might do it again tomorrow, thus get strong muscles to perform that work again. 

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Now if you injure yourself, you fall and break your arm and put your hand in a cast , now it sits in the cast for 6 weeks, now that muscle gets involuntarily rest and hardly moves at all. Now, your muscle starts degenerating , protein has a half life, it wears out, only when you move that muscle for growth then it rebuilds itself. But if it breaks down and you are not stimulating it, then it is not going to rebuild the missing pieces, and now you start a process called  ATROPHY or degenerating, now you get a skinny muscle. 

The same thing happens to the brain , may be even faster. Normally when you move an arm,  that movement sends signal to the brain and the job of the brain is to process that signal and control the arm. When you put your arm in a cast, then there are no more signals going to brain, the brain do not get stimulated , and just like the muscle that doesn't get stimulated , it starts to degenerate, which leads to brain shrinkage. With body parts movement, signals go to a specific area of the brain corresponding to that body part, and now that area of the brain starts degenerating and get a soft spot in the brain, a less healthy tissue area in your brain.

EXERCISE & SIGNALS : 

How are the signals in the body generated and what it has to do with exercise ?

Any time you have stretch or movement in the body, there are various receptors :

1. Mechano-receptors : Touch, Pressure , Skin Stretch , & Joint Motion.  From these are the most signals that reach the brain , for the brain to guide the motion and reaction. This is how the brain knows where your which parts are, remember your brain has no eyes.

2. Golgi Tendon Organ : Tenson-Tension (muscle) , where a muscle connects to a tendon and the tendon inserts to a bone. The muscle is actually strong enough to rip that tendon off the bone, there needs to be a sensor that tells the brain how much tension there is, so that it can slow the muscle down before it cause the injury.

3. Muscle Spindle Cells: This tells how the muscles are changing in length.

All of these are incredibly important information and this is most what the brain does - SIGNALS KEEP THE BRAIN ALIVE.

PURPOSE OF THE BRAIN :

1. Process Signals- that is why we have it. Coordinate the signals and function between the cells.

2. 90% Of These Signals Comes From Body Movement- movements generates these signals.

3. Mostly The Signals Comes From The Spine- 

That's because spine has lot of moving parts and the spine has higher receptor density than any other part of the body. Spine is the foundation or the platform from which all other body part works , the shoulder can only be stabilised after the spine is stable, so are the head and all other parts. When you walk, run, or when you stretch, you are always moving the spine. Even breathing creates a little bit of spine movement if you relax and have full breath when doing it. 

Chiropractic is the way to unlock your spine, if your spine is stuck then it do not help even if you walk, run or stretch because those signals are still not being generated.

Yoga is primarily about spine flexibility that most of the stretches are some how related to the muscles that make your spine flexible. Same things with Pilates and Core. These are excellent exercises that make  more signals around the spine and thus more signals for the brain. 

"MOVEMENT  IS THE JUICE THAT KEEPS THE BRAIN ALIVE".

What about people in COMA , there is no movement of body, very few signals are generated , as a result there is BRAIN DEGENERATION. What follows from this, is  MUSCLE  CONTRACTURES that can lead to permanent deformities. When the brain degenerates it loses it's ability to inhibit & muscles gets tighten-up, so the brain turns things ON & OFF . So, in order to set the muscle tone, it has to both turn ON & OFF continuously at the same time. So, they perform PHYSICAL THERAPY for hours every day to generate brain signals and try to keep the brain alive to minimise the deformities. 

MOVING THE BODY PARTS KEEP THE BRAIN FROM DYING.

DOING  NO  EXERCISE  MAY  LEAD  TO  PREMATURE  BRAIN  DEGENERATION.

BENEFITS OF EXERCISE:

What kind of activities or exercises you need to do to get certain benefits. I have published many blogs on exercise and fitness routine , request you to go through them to know more about the details .

1. BRAIN ACTIVATION -  Use It Or Lose It : This is by far the biggest reason to exercise.

2. BLOOD CIRCULATION : Blood circulation provides drainage , it brings nutrients to the tissues and it brings waste products from the tissues , if you can increase that circulation then you can increase the distribution of both nutrients and waste , which helps in DETOX.

We have a weird modern notion that we have to go to a GYM and do some special activity, you have to suffer, you have to produce blood sweating tears otherwise it doesn't count. It is all about moving your body through space against the feel of gravity and in doing so you generate signals to stimulate brain. 

Yard work, cycling, trekking, running.... things that you can do over a long period of time with lots of repetition and movement are great. Other examples are - swimming, tennis, golf etc., it's not that these are better than anything else, just examples. Do something that you enjoy, you like it and feel good then it's better for your brain. 

3. HORMONES : 

If you have been a couch potato for number of years or few decades, then you probably have some brain degeneration and if you want to reverse that then you have to do little bit more than the examples mentioned above, those are beneficial but not going to produce the intensity that challenges your body to make HUMAN GROWTH HORMONE (HGH) & BRAIN DERIVED NEUROTROHIC FACTOR (BDNF) - these are hormones that allows you to make new brain cells, even a few years ago they did not know that you can make new brain cells, they thought that you have certain numbers and as go through your life they go fewer and fewer and that's why you age. Today they know that you can make new brain cells , even more importantly , you can shape your brain - Neuroplasticity, you can make connections , you can rewire your brain, learn new things, you can expand certain areas of your brain. All of these is because of HORMONES, this is like a miracle. 

You can pretty much make these hormones in proportion to the intensity of the exercise that you perform. For this we have to do exercises with some weight, Sprints, HIIT (high intensity interval training ), you have to push your body , challenge it so that it has the reason to get better. 

But you do not need to do lot of these , you could do this 10-20 minutes a week , or 10-20 minutes in a day, twice a week, depending upon your physical capability, it doesn't take tremendous amount of your time, but has to be intense (Please read my previous blogs on short duration exercises/cardio, for the same).

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