Exercising to wellness and happiness at LMA Coaching

At LMA Coaching we like to include exercise as part of out virtuous circle, we believe simple increases in your physical activity, can have huge, huge psychological benefits. Even bigger benefits than the other mechanisms we have for boosting happiness chemically.

Babyak and colleagues looked at whether an exercise intervention really increase happiness for people with major depression.   There findings were pretty incredible, the group given the medicine showed a 50% recovery, but the group given a programme of just exercising for 30 minutes 3 times a week showed a 90% recovery.  Exercise alone also had stronger results than the tablet and exercise.  Much cheaper and easier than taking Zoloft or something similar.

Additionally we know that exercise can boost not just our mental health well-being but also our brain function and our cognitive function with it.   A study by  Hillman and colleagues go through all this different evidence that exercise actually helps cognitive function.

Looking at physical performance measured in physical fitness scores and cognitive achievement and if you look at correlations between these, what you find is that both in terms of reading achievement and mathematics achievement, there’s a correlation with physical fitness scores.  So, the higher your aerobic activity, the more likely you are going to be to be cognitively achieving higher in these domains.

What we found at LMA Coaching is that across different cognitive tasks from executive function to spatial reasoning to even response speed, those who are exercising more are actually doing better.

If you want to stay cognitively with it into old age, you should start not doing more cognitive kind of exercises, but just get to the gym and do some physical exercises, it will make you healthier and happier!

Your LMA Coaching Guide

You can start small with morning walks and then move upto more serious exercise, everything helps, the biggest thing is to start today, too easily a month or year will slip buy and you will look back and wish you has started today.  If you’d like a conversation to help you get started then contact Ben Warnes info@lmacoaching.org and book a free session.