Could strength training be the key to slowing cognitive decline? 

Amy Hudson and Dr. James Fisher continue the series on the relationship between strength training and aging. In this episode, they dive into how strength training can actually reverse cognitive decline and protect your brain from the effects of aging. They explore how building and maintaining muscle triggers neurobiological processes, boosts focus, reduces brain fog, and preserves critical neural connections. Tune in to discover why your workouts might be the smartest investment for your long-term brain health, and how simple changes in your strength routine could change the way you age.

• Dr. Fisher explains why things start to feel a bit slower as we age. It’s not just “getting older,” your brain is slowly losing connections while inflammation builds in the background. You’re still you, but tasks that used to feel automatic take more effort and feel less crisp.
• Amy shares how aging shows up daily. You walk into a room and forget why you’re there or a word hovers on the tip of your tongue but won’t come out. It’s subtle, but it builds frustration over time.
• Dr. Fisher covers the surprising relationship between strength and brain function. Stronger muscles and more muscle mass are linked to sharper thinking, faster processing, and better memory.
• Dr. Fisher breaks down what actually changes in the brain when you strength train. The areas responsible for focus, decision-making, and executive function get stronger while the usual decline slows down. This is the science behind why workouts can feel like a mental reset.
• Dr. Fisher explains how training your muscles improves brain function. Your muscles don’t just move you, they send powerful signals throughout your body. Those signals reach your brain and help it work more efficiently.
• Dr. Fisher covers how everything starts to connect better again when you strength train. Brain cells communicate more efficiently, energy flows more smoothly, and mental fog begins to lift. It’s like your brain regains some of its youthful clarity.
• Amy and Dr. Fisher explain why personal training plays such a key role in keeping your cognitive function sharp. Working with a professional helps you create the kind of consistent, targeted stimulus your brain actually needs. It’s the difference between exercising and truly training for brain health.
• Dr. Fisher explains why this research is a game changer. Strength training doesn’t just slow aging, it may actually push back against decline. That changes how we think about what’s possible for our later years.
• Amy explains why high performers make strength training non-negotiable. The benefits go beyond physical goals. Strong muscles feed focus, decision-making, energy, and overall mental performance.
• Amy and Dr. Fisher cover how to look at aging differently. Instead of waiting for decline, strength training helps you actively push in the other direction. It’s about creating control over your future, not accepting limitations.
• Amy shares that with strength training we do not have to accept traditional aging. You don’t have to accept memory lapses, brain fog, or slowed thinking. There’s a path to aging better and staying sharp longer.
• Amy and Dr. Fisher cover how personal training is one of the most effective tools to reverse aspects of aging. The guidance, structure, and consistent stimulus a trainer provides gives your brain the chance to thrive.
• Amy and Dr. Fisher explain why personal training is not just about fitness, but about protecting how well your mind performs. Strength training done right sends powerful signals that support cognition. That’s what gives you a real opportunity to push back against aging.
• Amy and Dr. Fisher conclude that strength training is one of the smartest investments you can make for your body and brain. The right training keeps muscles strong and minds sharper. It’s proof that aging does not have to mean slowing down.

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You can actually, by training your muscles in your body, help your brain. There’s molecular and cellular changes happening, impacted by these myokines within the brain. We can observe that people that are stronger tend to be more quick. Now there is actually evidence to support how. Welcome to the Strength Changes Everything podcast, where we introduce you to the information, latest research, and tools that will enable you to live a strong, healthy life. On this podcast, We will also answer your questions about strength, health, and well -being.

I’m Amy Hudson. I own and operate three exercise coach studios. My co -hosts are Brian Sagan, co -founder and CEO of The Exercise Coach, and Dr. James Fisher, leading researcher in evidence -based strength training. And now for today’s episode. Welcome back to the Strength Changes Everything podcast. We are kicking off a series of episodes today.

If you tuned in last week, you heard our intro to it, our high -level intro to it, all about what strength training reverses. We talked about aging last week. What are the elements of aging that impact us all, and how does strength training help in each of these areas and help ward off some of these things that we associate with aging. So today’s episode is called Strength Training Reverses Cognitive Decline. So cognitive decline is something that a lot of us associate with aging. And I guess let’s start off with this episode, Dr. Fisher, of let’s talk about kind of Why does cognitive decline happen as we age?

And maybe what are some examples of that that we might see in our lives as we get older? Yeah, thanks Amy. Yeah, this is a great question. We definitely see a decline in executive function is probably the key to that’s used in the sciences. And I should kind of clarify, executive function is kind of a broad topic that is explained by needing to pay attention to a task.

So it’s something that we can’t do on autopilot or based on instinct or intuition. So lots of times there are tests of executive function. It might be reading maybe a sequence of numbers where some numbers are missed out or some numbers are backwards or things like that. Or it might be something like a stroop test. And the stroop test is good fun. Oftentimes you’ll see a word and the word is in a certain color.

So it might say the word red, but it’s written in the color blue. And you’re asked to either read the word or to say the color. So you need to pay attention. You can’t just kind of be on autopilot and say the word you’ve got to actually think about it. And we definitely see a decline in that. in that level of cognitive performance as we age.

To some extent, this is linked in some cases, we were talking before the podcast, in some cases to dementia and Alzheimer’s. And we know that the brain effectively kind of loses degrees of neuro connectivity. There’s kind of chronic neuro inflammation and neural degeneration. So it just doesn’t perform quite as sharp and as quick as it once did. Now, Alzheimer’s and dementia are a little bit more than that, and we’re not focusing too much on those elements today. But the point being, we definitely see elements of executive function and cognitive function decline with age.

Okay, so what I basically just heard you say is that there are things that start happening to our brain as we age. Things, you know, our neuropathways maybe slow down their speed of five, Inflammation may happen over time, which will end up leading to effects of slower processing speed. And perhaps the example I think of is having trouble finding your words or expressing yourself forgetting why you walked into a room, brain fog, things like that, that a lot of us identify with, right, are examples that may come to mind. And it’s a result of changes happening in our brain because we’re aging. Is that fair?

Yeah, absolutely. That sounds pretty good. Okay. Okay. So then let’s get into it then. How does strength training help us with this?

Yeah. So in preparation for this podcast, I found a really nice paper and there’s an absolute wealth of research that’s looked at resistance training and cognitive performance. and executive function and reduction in risk of Alzheimer’s and dementia and neurodegenerative diseases like that, as well as mood states like anxiety or depression, self -esteem, so self -efficacy, so how we feel about ourselves and our belief in our ability to perform a given task. So there is an absolute wealth of research that’s looked at resistance training and specific or a broad range, sorry, of psychological kind of mood states and psychological or psychosocial kind of elements. But today I wanted to talk specifically about cognitive function. So I found the paper here, and as we can see, for those watching on YouTube, the paper’s titled Functional and or Structural Brain Changes in Response to Resistance Exercises and Resistance Training Lead to Cognitive Improvement, a Systematic Review.

Okay. And as we jump into the abstract here, you’ll see a few details on the screen again, if you’re watching on YouTube. So it says regarding. cognitive functions, substantial functional, e .g. g. compensatory or brain activity, and structural changes, e .

1. shrinking of the hippocampus in the brain, cause this decline. So much like we said earlier, notably growing evidence points towards a relationship between cognition and measures of muscular strength and muscle mass. So it’s been identified that there’s this longstanding relationship. The stronger somebody is, the more muscle mass they have, the better their cognitive performance. But the question has always been, is there kind of a causality?

Is there a mechanistic underpinning here. So they go on to say, based on this emerging evidence resistance exercises and or resistance training which contributes to the preservation and augmentation of muscular strength and muscle mass may trigger beneficial neurobiological processes and could be crucial for healthy aging that includes preservation of the brain and cognition. And ultimately I think this is one of the things that we’re all thinking about or we should be thinking about as we age is something that I have become more and more aware of as I age. I’m well aware that retaining my physical function is going to be enhanced by strength training and exercise, but actually It’s really important for me, especially as I see my parents or grandparents get older and I might see their cognitive decline, and maybe we’ve all been in that position, but it’s really important for me to be able to think, I want to stay sharp. I want to stay mentally clear with the vocabulary I have and with my capacity to undertake tasks of mental acuity. So the authors kind of go on to say here, they do a big systematic review.

They find in multiple studies, which they then review, and they say, based on our analysis, resistance exercises and resistance training evoke substantial functional brain changes, especially in the frontal lobe, which were accompanied by improvements in executive functions. Furthermore, resistance training led to lower white matter atrophy and smaller white matter lesion volumes. So they are issues that obviously hinder our brain’s capacity to perform tasks of executive function and cognitive function. So they’re saying that those physical changes within the brain, as well as some of the neurological changes in the brain, are what supports our maintenance of cognitive function. Interesting.

So basically, just to summarize what we just saw there on that previous screen is, we can observe We can observe that people that are stronger tend to be more quick, but now there is actually evidence to support how that is happening. There is a direct relationship between strength training and what you just described, the white matter, and what else was it? White matter atrophy and white matter lesion volumes. Yeah, so there’s an actual mechanism involved that we’re able to see now. So the next image I should say that I’ve put up on the screen, again, for those people watching on YouTube, this is up now. But if you’re not watching on YouTube, if you just listen to the podcast, this is worth going to check out.

So they actually put this up in their paper as kind of a rationale for why they’re doing this. why they were doing this systematic review. But actually I found this really interesting to look at because it kind of shows the different levels of mechanism by which resistance training can enhance cognitive function. So they talk first of all about molecular and cellular changes and they talk a bit about blood lactate, which we know can cross the blood -brain barrier. And they also talk about things like BDNF, which is brain -derived neurotrophic factor, and insulin -like growth factor one, tumor necrosis factor alpha, and they’re all myokines.

So those long -term listeners of the podcast will have heard me say those names multiple times before because they’re myokines. So we’re kind of taking a step back to things that We’re going over and over again, and I love that we’re coming back to this same theme. The muscle is an endocrine organ that when we forcefully contract muscle, we stimulate these myokines to be released, to go off and impact the body. And in this case, these are all things that go off and impact the brain. So there’s molecular and cellular changes happening, impacted by these myokines within the brain. They then kind of jump to a second level, and they say that there are functional and structural brain changes, and they talk about neuroelectric impulses, functional connectivity and brain morphology, as well as metabolic processes.

So the ability of cells within the brain to improve energy production, to use energy, to retain neural connectivity, and so forth. So they’re basically saying that these parts of the brain that typically lose this connectivity that kind of get clogged up or fogged up and slow down or stop working, they actually come back to life, or they are retained from engaging in resistance training. They jump to a third level, and I love this, because they say that, first of all, both of those can impact cognitive function independently. But as a kind of a trickle -down effect, they also say that those things can impact socio -emotional changes. And what they mean by that is they talk about sleep, stress, mood, pain.

And what we’re saying is that older people typically may not sleep as well, they may be in more pain because of conditions because of physiological conditions or arthritis or so forth. Um, they may have higher stress response to things, or they may have a different mood or anxiety or, you know, fear of falling or depression or so forth. And what the other two, what they’re saying at this third level is that these molecular or cellular changes and these functional and structural changes impact, impact us at a socio -emotional level because we now sleep better. We can handle stress better. Our mood is better, so our self -perception is better. Our fear of falling is reduced.

Our self -efficacy is improved. Our anxiety or depression is reduced. Our pain sensations are reduced. These are all things that we’ve talked about previously on the podcast. And again, those things can also lead to improvements in cognitive function and executive function, attention, memory, decision -making, and so forth. That is super cool.

Yeah, there’s so many levels on which it’s helping. I mean, and they all lead to each other and they’re kind of all intertwined and it seems like they build upon each other synergistically to create these improvements. Yeah, so it was a really fascinating paper and I wanted to just sort of highlight some summary points that they raised at the end of the paper itself. So they go on to say, resistance training can increase neurotrophic factors. So as we talked about the myokines and they support neuronal survival, synaptic plasticity and our learning processes. So effectively our brain is simply functioning as a younger brain would, it’s still got a capacity to learn, it’s still got a capacity to recall and to perform tasks with the same synaptic plasticity and neurosis.

or neural connectivity as it would do. We’re saying that resistance training enhances functional brain activity in the prefrontal cortex and that helps with executive functions of things like attention, inhibition, and switching between tasks and things like that. So our ability to, you know, move between certain tasks. And then there’s the physical structural brain health, so reductions in white matter atrophy and lesion volumes that are associated with cognitive decline. And then increases in cortical thickness and functional connectivity, which are associated with regions of the brain that are linked to memory and executive control. And of course, that are linked to, as we said, executive function, the stroop task, the flanker task.

and our neuroplastic adaptations. So really, it’s a really interesting paper and a really fantastic paper that summarizes how resistance training can support or resist aging or reverse aging as far as cognitive decline. It is super cool. I think about this on two levels. You know, one, if you’re sort of in the thick of these concerns because of your age, if you’re listening today, These are things that you’re familiar with because you will have talked about these things with your neurologist and your doctor. And this is really exciting to learn that you can actually, by training your muscles in your body, help your brain.

It’s almost like the brain is its own muscle, but it’s not. But it is impacted just like your muscles are positively impacted by your strength training. But then I also think about it from the perspective of somebody who maybe doesn’t have these concerns yet or hasn’t seen any of these major signs of decline yet but cares about this. And I just think about CEOs and high performers and business leaders and how often they talk about how caring for their physical body and their strength helps them be better at their job and, you know, today and also in the future to be better today at what they do, but also stay working at that high level in the future. So those are kind of the initial things that come to my mind as far as how this applies to everyone. Yeah.

And of course, different people have different executive capacity anyway, in different mental capacity anyway. You know, for me as an academic, you know, it’s so important. for me to have that, that kind of identity. Um, you know, part of my identity is that, that I have a PhD and that I’ve studied at that level and that I read these research papers and I, I can’t imagine ever being in a position where I read research papers and don’t understand them or, you know, or I just can’t function at that level with the, with the tasks that I’m trying to undertake. So it’s really quite frightening and it might be frightening for some people, but as you say, whether that’s in. uh, you know, high level executive, um, you know, in employment and so forth.

So all across the board, this is so important for people. And again, as the paper highlights, you know, associate emotional level as well, our ability to interact with people at, uh, you know, emotional levels and, and our social interactions. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. I think a theme of these episodes is going to be, we do not have to accept. traditional aging.

We do not have to accept what we typically associate in various categories. And so I’m super excited to continue this series next week as we delve into more areas that strength training reverses that we do not like associated with aging. So thank you, Dr. Fisher, for breaking all this down for us today. and we will see you next week on the podcast. Until then, we hope you remember, strength changes everything. Thanks for listening.

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