How Hannah Betts was converted to exercise
Scientists say the middle-aged brain will shrink without regular exercise. Lifelong gym-dodger Hannah Betts gets physical
You may have seen the headlines provoked by a recent article in the journal Neurology, proposing that getting fit before you hit 50 is the key to preventing brain shrinkage in older age. Science has long shown exercise to have encouraging effects on life expectancy. Now, the results of a two-decade study suggest that committing to regularly feeling the burn by one’s forties might not only add years to one’s life, but ensure one is fully sentient for them.
For the athletic few, such information only confirmed their conviction that a healthy body equals a healthy mind, now and in the future. However, for lifelong exercise phobics such as myself, the link between fitness and intelligence may only just be beginning to become obvious.
And who can blame us for our mistaken air of superiority? Sporting types are not renowned for being the brightest biscuits in the box. If I was wont to associate exercise with idiot jocks and brainless Insta-evangelists – well, little wonder.
I prized the life of the mind, while the majority of gym occupants would appear to conform to this more-brawn-equals-less-brain stereotype. While I could hold my own in sport at school, hedonism and sybaritism seemed so much cooler. Exercise appeared not only moronic, but tryhard, meaning that, in adulthood, physical activity was confined to sex and my drinking arm – my only muscular area, the over-developed calves born of gadding about in heels.
But, then, last year, I stopped moving altogether. My mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer in December 2014. Her last six months dictated a life spent either working or caring, taxiing between train and sick bed. When she died, in June, my misery manifested itself as still greater physical incapacity, my existence limited to a bed-bathroom-kitchen-desk loop within my miniscule, onebedroom flat.
A colleague sent me to a hypnotist to see if he could get me moving. He couldn’t – that week I reached a new low by sliding off my desk chair asleep. Aware that confining myself like a veal calf might be contributing to my apocalyptic mood, I purchased a Fitbit step calculator (renamed the “Titbit” after being attached to my bra) and vaguely – very vaguely – attempted its requisite 10,000 steps a day (about five miles).
Come September, another benevolent editor sent me on a restorative jaunt to Greece in the care of White Calm, a bespoke healing holiday company, set up by Rebecca Tucker, director of Quintessentially a lifestyle concierge service, and overseen by London’s most respected fitness guru and all-round brainiac, Stephen Price.
Pre-departure, Price arranged a terrifying assessment at his state-ofthe art Chelsea gym, home to exercise’s intelligentsia. His tests covered nutrition, mobility and mental state, plus a few days attached to a heart monitor to measure physiological stress, sleep, and response to physical activity – all highlighting my inability to move. Mortifyingly, on one particularly sluggish day, the monitor recorded that I burnt a mere 57 calories on activity – the type of expenditure typically accounted for by a strenuous bout of nose picking. My basic mobility results (stretching, neck turning and the like) put me at 55. I was 43.
“I don’t think you realise how serious this is,” Stephen winced, as he took me through my results. “I’d expect more from someone in their nineties – mid-nineties”.
“But, my Fitbit!” I cried. “And I was in better shape than everyone else on our flight.”
“Think of 10,000 steps as the minimum human requirement,” he retorted. “And I reckon you can aim higher than easyJet standards.
“For an intelligent person, you’re doing something incredibly stupid,” he continued. “You’re getting away with it now – you don’t look unfit and don’t have any injuries. But the next 10 years will be a different story. You need to act now and stop this selfsabotage of your body and brain.”
Genius that he is, he had put his finger on the incentive I needed: an appeal not to physical vanity, but to intellectual pride.
Price set me a pathetically simple routine: 20 minutes speed-walking on an incline, followed by three sets of “bird-dogs”, “T-spine rotations”, “hip bridges” and something called “mountain climbers”. Squats and scrambling into a plank came later. The aim was to shock my body into action. His demand was that I complete these exercises in 20 out of the next 21 days, putting the focus on frequency and consistency; I managed 18. Having shocked my system, I was then allowed to complete the next 20 sessions over a more leisurely 40 days, thereby proving to myself that I could find time to exercise regularly.
It was then that I was introduced to Price’s bike of doom: a spinning machine in an altitude chamber mimicking oxygen-deprived mountain air, forcing one’s body to slog harder. The object: 10km in 20 minutes. There was never a moment when I felt I could do this, but I did it all the same. And what was most noticeable was not my increase in fitness, but the impact on my mind.
I would arrive brain-addled,
On one particularly sluggish day, I burnt a mere 57 calories on activity