CARDIO FEATURE
The Aristocracy of Cardio
New science has linked aerobic exercise not just to healthier hearts, but to improved brainpower, too. Is that why the world's most wildly successful men—from presidents to rappers—all engage in intense aerobic workouts? More important: Why don't you?
By Adam Campbell
I CAN MAKE YOU SMARTER IN 30 MINUTES.
Not the kind of smart that's acquired through learning something new, like small-engine repair or quadratic equations. I'm talking about improving your brain from the inside out, the kind of smart that leads to faster and more accurate decision making, yields greater productivity, and inspires innovation. If you want to be calculating about it, it's the kind of smart that makes you money.
And all you'll need to invest is a half hour, three or four hundred calories, and couple of thousands for a decent pair of running shoes.
For years, aerobic exercise has been touted for its many health benefits; it's no leap to suggest that it can reduce your risk of nearly every known disease.
And this is especially true concerning heart health. But the effect of cardio reaches far beyond lipid profiles and blood-pressure readings. In fact, it may do as much for your brain as it does for your ticker; maybe more.
Richard Haig believes it. When he retired early from his position as president of one of the largest security firms on the East Coast, Haig was financially set for life. At 38, he focused on getting his handicap down to 10, but found that he was crushingly bored. So he took up a new challenge: cardio. What started as a daily two-mile walk became an ultraendurance lifestyle within a year—he once ran 63 miles nonstop in a charity race. Sure, his fitness level improved, but what he really noticed was that his brain was overflowing. That's when he went back to work.
Since Haig's return as CEO, his company, Haig Security Systems, has been as invigorated by his exercise as his body has. "It's no coincidence that I've done more to increase the company's value in the past two years than I had in the previous 10."
IT'S NOT HARD TO FIND successful men who will swear by the effect cardiovascular exercise has had on their careers and their whole lives. But what may surprise you is the number who credit it not just as a component of their success, but as the catalyst.
For a group of road-hardened examples, look to the competitors in the CEO Challenge, a program for CEOs competing in Ironman triathlons, which require participants to complete a 2.4-mile swim, a 26.2-mile run, and a 112-mile bike ride in less than 17 hours. At stake: the title "World's Fittest CEO." According to Ted Kennedy (not the US senator), president of CEO Challenge, the Colorado company that started the competition four years ago, you'll find that the majority of these executives believe their training improves all aspects of their lives, from the family dining room to the corporate boardroom.
"Most of the men who compete in this event say that without aerobic exercise, they wouldn't be CEOs," he says.
You might consider men like Haig and the Ironman CEOs to be a self-selected group: executives who love to run, cycle, or swim, and therefore attribute their success to it. For every successful man who exercises, there are probably two successful men who amply fill, and overflow, the seat of power. And there's no amount of cardio that will lead a career hamburger-flipper to invent Google. But in man-to-man competition—fittest versus fattest—we propose that cardio does grant an earned, unfair advantage. Call it the aristocracy of cardio. And, according to a growing body of scientific research, it all starts between the ears.
THERE HAVE BEEN THOUSANDS of studies on how aerobic exercise affects cardiovascular health, but there are equally powerful ones that assess its impact on mental performance. Of course, intuitively, one could argue that cardio is just mentally arousing, like a Starbucks double latte.
Exercise, after all, raises your heart rate and increases the flow of oxygen-rich blood throughout your body, including your brain. This is a partial explanation, but the whole picture is more complicated.
One of the first studies to find that exercise improves brain performance was a 1986 investigation of 30 women at Purdue University. During the study, the women boosted their fitness levels by 17 percent and simultaneously netted a 12-68 percent improvement in their ability to process information and make sound decisions. This suggested, for the first time in a laboratory setting, that exercise improves high-level cognitive function. The women in the study weren't simply more alert; they were, in effect, better thinkers.
In 1991, a Kent State researcher named Wojtek Chodzko-Zajko proposed that the more complex the mental task, the more beneficial the effect of aerobic exercise. Over the next few years, his theory gained currency, and a name was given to the thought process he described: Appropriately enough, it became known as executive control.
Twelve years later, scientists demonstrated the effect of a single session of exercise on these higher mental processes. In his lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Charles Hillman, PhD, tested the hypothesis that cardio improves a person's ability to process information immediately after exercise. He recruited 20 college-age men and women to work out at a moderate intensity on a treadmill for 30 minutes, on two separate occasions. He outfitted them with an electroencephalo-graph—which looks like a 1920s leather football helmet decorated with two dozen electrodes—allowing him to monitor which brain functions exercise affected most.
At one session, the participants were asked to take a mental test before they exercised; at the other, they took the test afterward. When they worked out before the test, they showed increased activity in areas of the brain that control attention and memory. According to Hillman, this should translate into being able to multitask at a greater speed while making more accurate decisions. Does that sound like a guy fit for the boss's chair, or what?
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Men's Health Philippines - November 2006 Issue
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On days you exercise, you can accomplish in eight hours what would normally take you nine hours and 25 minutes.
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