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Today’s Health Upgrade
Can you avoid cognitive decline?
Add this when battling burnout
The unintentional hunger-booster
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Fitness
Can You Avoid Cognitive Decline?
Imagine if the key to protecting your brain was hiding in the weight room. Stop dreaming because this one is reality.
Recent research found that regular resistance training can promote brain health and may help delay or reduce the onset of cognitive decline.
Scientists focused on different types of training — everything from brain exercises to pumping iron — to determine the protective effects on adults older than 55. They found that weight training acted like a protective shield around the hippocampus, the part of the brain associated with memory and learning. This brain region is crucial in resisting cognitive decline, and maintaining health is essential for staving off dementia.
It appears that resistance training can enhance “hippocampal plasticity”—the brain’s ability to adapt and change, which is why it leads to better cognitive health.
And that’s not all. Other research has found that strength training also reduces amyloid plaques, which are associated with Alzheimer’s disease.
If you want to upgrade your brain protection, the participants saw benefits by performing a total of 90 minutes of resistance training per week, split between two to three workouts.
Health
Battling Burnout? Add This To Reset Your Brain
You probably know creatine as the go-to supplement for building strength, but recent research shows it may do much more than that—especially for your brain.
When you’re over-stressed, under-slept, and needing mental resilience, creatine might be the ally your brain needs to stay sharp and focused.
Researchers wanted to understand how creatine supplementation impacts brain health and function, especially under conditions of metabolic stress—like sleep deprivation or high stress.
When you’re metabolically stressed— such as when you’re sleep-deprived — your brain burns through creatine much faster, which can harm mental performance.
Creatine supplementation can support brain function by replenishing what is burned off when stress is high, helping you stay mentally clear even when you’re exhausted. Creatine also supports ATP production, a primary energy source for brain cells.
In multiple studies, participants taking creatine showed improved cognitive function and faster reaction times when sleep-deprived. When you can’t afford to feel mentally sluggish, creatine offers a natural solution that helps maintain cognitive function.
If you’re looking for a quality source of creatine, here’s our recommendation. (If you decide to give it a try, use the code “PUMPCLUB” at checkout for 25 percent OFF),
Nutrition
The Unintentional Hunger-Booster
If you ever tried to eat smaller meals and snacks throughout the day and couldn’t lose weight, there might be a good reason.
Contrary to popular opinion, research suggests that eating more meals per day could make you hungrier.
Many people believe that small, frequent meals help with weight loss. However, when scientists control total calories (every eats the same number of total calories) but spread across three or six meals, they found that eating more often did not increase metabolism or speed up fat loss. In other words, calories were still king.
But those studies controlled how much people consumed, meaning you must consider what happens when you’re left to your devices. When calories are not controlled, how often you eat might influence how hungry you feel, which could play an important role in determining your intake.
Put another way, eating small frequent meals could increase overall hunger, making it easier to overeat calories, especially later in the day.
This does not mean you can’t eat small meals and snacks. If it works for you, keep doing it. However, if you’re trying to lose weight and hunger is a problem, it might help to eat fewer meals overall and make sure each meal is bigger and more caloric.
And, if you want to gain weight, eating more frequently could help you eat more overall to move the scale.
This might explain why so many bodybuilders swear by eating more often. It’s not that calories don’t exist; it’s that eating more frequently allows them to consume more calories. It also explains why the old approach of snacking throughout the day didn’t work well for many people because it could’ve caused more intense hunger and made it harder to stay within their calorie goals.
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Publisher: Arnold Schwarzenegger
Editors-in-chief: Adam Bornstein and Daniel Ketchell
