Ride smart
How cycling can improve brain function
Exercise has long been linked to better mental health, and many’s the endurance athlete who will claim that prolonged endeavour can bring on a meditative, near-transcendental state. But a team of scientists from Griffith University and the University of Sydney has now gone one better: they’ve found evidence that cycling can boost cognitive function.
Their study Cognitive Effects of Acute Aerobic Exercise, published in August 2020, took 21 trained cyclists and had them complete 45 minutes of moderate-intensity cycling followed by an incremental ride to exhaustion. ‘Cognitive function was assessed at Baseline, after 15 and 45 minutes of exercise and at Exhaustion’ using a reaction test – pressing a button when a black box turned red – and a Stroop test, with the subjects asked to press a button corresponding to the colour of the letters of a word – for example ‘blue’ written in red – not the meaning of the word.
The results showed notable improvements in cognition after cycling, with the 15-minute results better than the baseline and the 45minute results better still. However, while riding to exhaustion didn’t impair cognitive function as one might imagine, researchers did observe that ‘the magnitude of improvement appears to decrease with increasing task complexity’. All this is not to say you’re smarter after exercise, but you’ll be more likely to win a pub quiz if you ride 45 minutes to get there. Probably.