Exercise makes your brain love gaming

Exercise makes your brain love gaming

It is common for gamers to have an inactive lifestyle, spending a lot of time seated. A lifestyle without moving the body on regular bases is negatively linked with physical, psychological, and cognitive health issues. These unhealthy lifestyle habits often lead to obesity, negative emotions such as depression and anxiety, and severe deficits in cognitive functions.

Cognitive functions such as ignoring distractions, processing information, and shifting attention plays a critical role in achieving optimal CSGO performance.

In this article, we take a look at how exercising makes your brain work better in gaming and can reduce the health risks associated with being a gamer.

Get up and move to perform better

It is well known that exercise has a positive effect on how well our brains can perform. Even a single workout has been shown to prime the brain for better cognitive and motor task performance, e.g aiming.

Exercise improves cognitive abilities

In one study, 87 young people completed various cognitive tasks with and without 30 minutes of exercise. People were divided into 4 groups to either complete 30 min of exercise on a treadmill with light, moderate, or high intensity, or none exercise as a control group. The study found that 30 min of exercise made people perform significantly better in concentration-related cognition task compared to the none exercise group. The study found moderate intensity to be the most beneficial for cognitive performance. Other studies found increased cognitive performance even after 20 minutes of exercise(1,2)

More cognitive benefits

After exercising for 20-30 minutes with moderate intensity, you can expect to see greater:

• Reaction time
• Information processing
• Memory
• Attention
• Executive functioning

Exercise more often to reduce health risks

Finding time to exercise regularly can be difficult, but the many benefits of doing so are long-lasting. This means that you don’t need to exercise right before gaming to achieve greater cognitive abilities. When you exercise regularly, you improve your overall health by strengthening your heart and cardiovascular system, which supplies your body with oxygen and nutrients.

Besides the overall health benefits of long term exercise, you also reduce the risk of fatigue, pain, and injury.

If this article got you motivated to start exercising but you don’t know where to start, look up The Healthy Gamers Handbook.