Ok, let’s talk about legs. I came across this study about leg power and cognitive decline that got me really interested.
It’s a 10-year study from King’s College London that followed 324 healthy women who were twins from midlife into their seventies. Researchers measured leg power which is how much force and speed each person’s legs could produce. Some of the identical twin pairs also had brain scans, taken over a decade apart. And what they found was that in each pair, the twin with stronger legs at the start tended to keep a sharper mind and lose less brain volume by the end.
It’s very tempting to read this as “train your legs, protect your brain.” But that’s not quite what the study says, and the researchers are careful about this too. Their best explanation isn’t that leg muscles feed the brain directly. It’s that leg power is a good stand-in for how active a person has been over many years. We use our legs constantly – walking, standing, climbing stairs – so how strong they are reflects a much longer pattern of movement than a single test could show. The brain and the legs may simply both be responding to the same habit: staying active.
So, if you would like to stay active and add more healthy movement to your week, I will be teaching my regular yoga classes on Monday evening and Wednesday morning from September 7th onwards. The topics for the term will focus on both strong legs and healthy back
If you’d like to learn more about the topics, the dates and spaces, please do get in touch.
Source: Steves CJ, Mehta MM, Jackson SHD, Spector TD. “Kicking Back Cognitive Ageing: Leg Power Predicts Cognitive Ageing after Ten Years in Older Female Twins.” Gerontology, 2016;62(2):138–149.
Photo by Mathilde Langevin on Unsplash
