It's no secret that weightlifting is good for you, but now a new study on brains and brawn suggests that going hard in the gym for as little as 20 minutes can boost your long-term memory by 10 percent.
“Our study indicates that people don’t have to dedicate large amounts of time to give their brain a boost,” study leader Lisa Weinberg, a graduate student at the Georgia Institute of Technology, said in a written statement.
For the study, researchers asked 46 healthy young adults to try to remember a series of 90 photographs that were shown on a computer screen. Then half of the group worked out on a leg-extension exercise machine -- doing 50 reps -- while the other half sat in a chair and didn't exercise. The researchers then took saliva samples from each person.
Two days later, the same men and women met with the researchers again to look at a series of 180 photographs, which included the 90 photos that were shown before. This time, the men and women were asked to recall which photos they had seen previously and which were new.
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