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Enhancing and Sustaining Cognitive Health Through High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT)

Updated: 2 days ago

Boost your brain power
Boost your brain power

In functional medicine, we champion lifestyle-based approaches like nutrition, sleep, and exercise as foundational pillars for healthy aging. While it's widely accepted that various forms of physical activity benefit our brains, exciting new research is helping us understand how specific types of exercise can proactively protect against age-related cognitive decline.


Unlocking the Transformative Power of HIIT: Beyond Weight Loss


What is it all about?
What is it all about?

You may have heard of HIIT, but what you might not know is that its benefits go far beyond simple weight loss, and it's officially endorsed by leading health organizations like the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM). Let's dive into what HIIT is, why it's so transformative, and how you can start doing it safely at home today.


What Exactly is HIIT?

HIIT isn't about spending hours at the gym. It's the opposite. It’s a workout style characterized by short bursts of all-out effort (working at 80-95% of your maximum heart rate) followed by brief periods of rest or low-intensity recovery. A full HIIT session can be done in just 10-30 minutes.


The magic of HIIT lies in pushing your body to its limits for a short time. This "good stress" signals your body to make powerful adaptations that improve your health from head to toe.


The evidence for HIIT is overwhelming.


The evidence for HIIT
The evidence for HIIT

The study, published by Blackmore et al., focused on the hippocampus, the part of our brain responsible for memory, learning, and emotion. The hippocampus is known to be vulnerable to aging, and a decrease in its volume is often linked to cognitive impairment. HIIT has been clinically proven as a superior health intervention, offering profound benefits that surpass typical fitness trends.




Benefit

Description

Superior Heart and Lung Health

As highlighted by the ACSM, HIIT is exceptionally effective at improving VO2 max—the best measure of your cardiorespiratory fitness and a strong predictor of longevity—while also lowering blood pressure and improving blood vessel health.

A Complete Metabolic Makeover

From a functional medicine perspective, HIIT is a potent tool for improving insulin sensitivity for better blood sugar management and is brilliant for burning visceral fat, the dangerous type around your organs that drives chronic disease.

A Powerful and Lasting Boost for Your Brain

HIIT doesn’t just build a strong body; it builds a resilient mind. This is powerfully demonstrated in studies where, compared to lower-intensity exercise, only the HIIT group showed a significant improvement in cognitive functions like spatial learning. Incredibly, these benefits were retained for up to five years after the intervention. Furthermore, MRI scans confirmed that HIIT helped preserve brain volume in the right hippocampus and led to enhanced brain connectivity.

Remarkable Time-Efficiency

Finally, the "Exercise is Medicine" initiative promotes HIIT because it overcomes one of the biggest barriers to physical activity: time. You can achieve all these health benefits in a fraction of the time compared to moderate-intensity continuous exercise.


A Functional Medicine Perspective


A Functional Medicine Perspective
A Functional Medicine Perspective

These findings are pivotal. They suggest that for healthy older adults, incorporating high-intensity intervals may be a highly effective strategy not just for maintaining but for actively

improving cognitive function related to memory.





Enhancing Cognitive Wellness with Tailored High-Intensity Training


This aligns perfectly with the functional medicine framework, where we move beyond simply managing decline and work toward optimizing health. The evidence from this study allows us to have more specific conversations about exercise prescriptions. For patients concerned about brain-aging, a personalized health strategy that includes appropriate and carefully monitored high-intensity training could be a powerful tool for building a more resilient brain.


If you want to learn how to safely integrate HIIT into your routine Book your Discovery Call today.




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