Why Hitting the Gym Might Just Help You Ace Your Next Midterm

            I’m as liable as anyone to do it. Whenever I have a big midterm coming up, I forgo the gym in exchange for a couple extra hours of studying. After all, I reason, the exam is more important; the gym will still be there in a week. However, new research done by The Laboratory of Biochemistry and Neuroscience at the University of Tsukuba in Japan suggests that if you want to ace your exams, getting back on the treadmill might actually be a good idea.

            Exercise demands a lot from the brain. During exercise, countless neurons are activated; they generate, receive, and interpret messages from other neurons and coordinate everything from organ function to muscle movement to the balance that keeps you from falling over during your weekly yoga session (It’s okay, I have trouble with Tree Pose too). All of this work done by your brain requires an incredible amount of energy, and this energy often comes in the form of glycogen, stored carbohydrates.

            In the recent study done, published in The Journal of Physiology, researchers tested the effects of exercise on glycogen levels in the brain. What they found is that exercise depleted the majority of glycogen stores, but after a good meal of carbohydrates the glycogen levels were back up not only to where they were before exercise, but the brain had done a form of carbo-loading, and glycogen levels were even higher than before exercise!

            So how does increased glycogen levels in the brain relate to doing well on that one really hard midterm you’ve been dreading? You can think of glycogen as a kind of fuel for the brain, and an increase in fuel leads to an increase in productivity. What the experimenters found is that the increases in glycogen in the brain were predominantly in the areas of the cortex and the hippocampus—areas of the brain involved in learning and memory.

            But before you congratulate yourself and take a run on the treadmill in an effort to increase your chances of being able to learn all the material for your test, you should know there’s a catch—the study found that only working out once did not lead to a long-term increase in the baseline levels of glycogen in the brain. However, working out on a fairly consistent basis for four weeks did lead to a lasting increase in glycogen levels.

            So, on that note, I leave to go find my sneakers, Ipod, and a banana (remember to eat foods high in glycogen after working out), and hope that if I exercise enough, maybe I will finally be able to memorize everything for my tests.