Denise Medved at Ageless Grace shares three of her 21 simple exercises to do each day to fortify your brain. Denise says,
“Breaking out of your normal patterns of movement is important to firing new neurons and creating new neural pathways. Most people don’t do new things. They do what they already know how to do, and they repeat it. Breaking out of that pattern is really important, to find new neurons, and create new neural pathways. Obviously, the best thing to do is actually physically do them with me, but I can describe a few that will help you be able to get started and see a difference in your own brain. You do these sitting down.”
1. Gentle Geometry. Denise says, “It uses the shapes of a triangle, a circle and a line, either vertical or horizontal. We’ll start making a circle, for example, with your right hand. And after you get that going, then start to draw a triangle in the air with your left foot, your opposite foot. Try to do them both at once. And then, depending on the group — many people cannot do this at all, and that’s the point of it. Everybody laughs, everybody’s laughing. But you want to keep trying — the minute you stop, that means your neurons stop firing. You’re making the circle with one hand, so you don’t want to stop and say, I can’t do this. I give up, you wanna say ‘I’m gonna keep trying so I can fire neurons,’ and then I might add a third thing, and say, ‘with the other hand make a horizontal line.’ So you might be doing a circle with one hand, with the opposite foot, and then a horizontal line with the opposite hand. And you keep doing this to a song, something that you like. You put on some music, and when the song is about halfway through, you switch and you mirror it, so that you’re switching sides of the brain that you’re working. So now the other hand is making the circle, the other foot is making the triangle and the other hand is doing that.”
2. Spelling B. “B stands for body, and it means you’re spelling using your body parts. You could spell lots of different words. You could do it in cursive, you could do it in Japanese, you could do it in Spanish, whatever you like. But just to make it simple, to explain it, I might say: In lowercase cursive, write the word health in the air with your nose. So you would move your and write, go back and cross the T, and you might do that three or four times. And then you might write health with your right elbow two or three times, write it with your left elbow. And getting into some of the humor, write the word health in case cursive with your belly button. Look how much of your body it’s used: your whole abdominal wall, rib cage, spine. And then you might write health in the air with your foot two or three times, and then with the other foot, or with your back against the wall. So you use all kinds of body parts. And again, we could have written several different words. It doesn’t matter, as long as you’re switching up and using words, and you’re writing them with your body parts, because your brain right away is stimulating those functions of the brain. It stimulates all five of them simultaneously.”
3. Pretend swimming. “Another quick one, that’s very easy, is the idea of swimming. So you might lean back in your chair, and obviously to put your feet up in front of you in order to paddle, because you’re seated. So right away, your brain is saying, well, how would I swim in a chair? Feet in front? And then you do as many different strokes as you can think of. A crawl, an Australian crawl, a breast stroke, a butterfly. That also stimulates the brain as well as moves the body.”
Learn more about:
* Denise Medved: https://agelessgrace.com/denise-medved/
* Ageless Grace: https://agelessgrace.com/about/
* The Vitality Revolution podcast series: https://answersforelders.com/vitality-revolution/
* Humana: https://www.humana.com/
* Answers for Elders: https://answersforelders.com/welcome-to-answers-for-elders/
Answers for Elders is part of the SeniorResource Network: https://www.seniorresource.com/
Check out our affiliate podcast Alzheimer’s Speaks: https://alzheimersspeaks.com/
