It’s well known that exercise can have a substantial impact upon our mental health and wellbeing.  Indeed, studies have long linked exercise with our ability to learn and perform complex mental tasks.

A recent Dutch study goes into significantly more detail however, and suggests that there is a particular time in which exercise has the biggest benefit on our learning capabilities.

Excercise and learning

The study found that exercising immediately after attempting to learn something has little impact upon our absorbtion rate, but if we do so precisely four hours later, the impact can be significant.

“It shows that we can improve memory consolidation by doing sports after learning,” the authors say.

The researchers came to their conclusion after studying the impact a single session of exercise (which consisted of 35 minutes of interval training on an exercise bike) had on the performance of participants in memory consolidation and long-term memory tests.

Now, it should be said that the participants were split into three groups, with one doing the tests straight after the exercise, one doing the tests having exercised 4 hours previously, and one doing them having not exercised at all.  So it isn’t clear if 4 hours is somehow better than 3 hours 30 minutes, or 4 hours 15 minutes or other variants, but those in the 4 hour group did retain significantly more of what they had tried to learn when tested again 48 hours later.

When they were placed inside a MRI scanner, it revealed that those in the four hour group had more precise representations in the hippocampus when a question was answered correctly.

So whilst it isn’t clear that 4 hours is the magic number, it does appear to suggest that a delay between learning and exercise can be beneficial.

“Our results suggest that appropriately timed physical exercise can improve long-term memory and highlight the potential of exercise as an intervention in educational and clinical settings,” the researchers conclude.

At the moment, the study raises as many questions as it provides answers.  For instance, it isn’t clear quite why delayed exercise boosts our memory, or indeed what specific timeframes we’re talking about.

It’s possible that catecholamine chemicals in the body are boosted by the exercise, and these have an impact on our ability to consolidate memory.  Tests on animals have suggested this is the case, but more work needs to be done to explore this in humans.