If you worry about cognitive dysfunction as you grow older but struggle to perform the 150 minutes of weekly exercise recommended to protect against it, you’ll find good news in recent research. Even 25 minutes of moderate movement in a week may contribute to a bigger, healthier brain.
“You hear that you need 10,000 steps a day or 150 minutes a week,” Cyrus Raji, MD, PhD, tells The Washington Post. “But [those goals are] very hard to reach.” Indeed, a 2023 study reviewing the exercise habits of American adults found that only 28 percent managed to meet those guidelines.
So Raji and his team set out to determine whether a more manageable exercise regimen might deliver similar cognitive outcomes. “We wondered, if we chose a very low threshold of exercise, what would we see?” he says.
Researchers reviewed the brain scans of 10,125 healthy volunteers between the ages of 18 and 97, along with their medical histories and self-reported exercise data recorded in the two weeks before the scans.
Dividing the participants into two groups — those who exercised 25 minutes or more a week and their less-active counterparts — the researchers used the scans to compare the brain volumes of each group’s members.
They found that the brains of more physically active participants were larger than the brains of those who were more sedentary. The differences in volume appeared throughout the brain, including in white matter known to facilitate cellular connections.
“Due to the multiple mechanisms through which physical activity can improve brain volumes, there are important implications for . . . optimizing brain health and improving dementia.”
The brains of the exercisers also displayed a larger hippocampus — a key player in memory. That area tends to shrink as we grow older.
Raji suggests in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease that the salutary effects of moderate exercise on the brain could be due to reduced neuroinflammation and increased levels of brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which helps grow new brain cells and blood vessels.
“Due to the multiple mechanisms through which physical activity can improve brain volumes, there are important implications for this approach for optimizing brain health and improving dementia,” he notes.
The results might offer hope to those who are unable to get to the gym on a regular basis.
“This is an exciting finding,” says David Raichlen, PhD, a professor of biological sciences and anthropology at the University of Southern California who was not involved in the study. “And [it] gives us more fuel for the idea that being physically active can help maintain brain volume across the life span.”
This article originally appeared as “Move For Your Mind” in the January/February 2026 issue of Experience Life.
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