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How to Improve Your Brainpower: A Newly Discovered Method
I’m taking a one-day break from political writing to find out how to keep my brain healthy enough to continue writing about politics
A new study in how not to get Alzheimer’s caught my attention today. The study, published in PubMed less than two weeks ago, is titled “Cognitive gains and cortical thickness changes after 12 weeks of resistance training in older adults with low and high risk of mild cognitive impairment.”
If you had Alzheimer’s, I’ll bet you couldn’t even read the study’s title. But you did read it, so you don’t have it.
Yet.
Resistance training is not being resistant to training (oh, bad joke). Nor is it lifting 50 percent or more of your body weight over your head, which is strength training done to build a bulky body. Resistance training does build some muscle but is done to get in shape rather than to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1970s.
More often than not, resistance training uses your own body to produce results. It’s sit-ups, push-ups, pull-ups, the plank…