Exercise. Because.

Peter G. Levine
Stronger After Stroke

Monday, January 18, 2010

I was interviewed for this article on the Cleveland Clinic website. What I like most about it is that it also mentions one of my neuroscience heroes John Ratey. The fact that I'm mentioned before him - and more often - is just plain wrong.

The focus of this article is the impact of exercise on stroke recovery. But exercise per se does not necessarily drive the sort of cortical changes needed to recover. Of course, it is important to do both cardiovascular and strengthening exercises after stroke, if for no other reason than the fact that life poststroke takes so much energy for two reasons:

• Typically everything a stroke survivor does takes twice as much energy. A good example of this is walking. A stroke survivor takes an average of twice as much energy to walk as someone who has not had a stroke.
• Stroke survivors are in about half as good a shape as age matched couch potatoes.
• Although it hasn't been measured, neuroplasticity takes energy. We're not sure how much. But when you consider that the brain gets 20% of total body oxygen consumption, while it only represents 2% of total body weight, you can imagine how much energy it takes to drive neuroplastic change.

So the bottom line is that stroke recovery needs energy. And exercise is good for banking energy.

See the original article:

Exercise. Because.

in

Stronger After Stroke