Health Farm

-- Exercise is good for the body, reducing risks of chronic disease, boosting cardiovascular health, muscles and bones – just about everything inside your skin bag (including your skin). It’s also good for the mind.

With less than a quarter of Americans getting enough exercise, should we be surprised that around 40 million adults in the United States each year experience symptoms of depression?

Researchers argue that an overwhelming body of research points to exercise as effective “medicine” for depression.

A new paper published in Current Sports Medicine claims exercise has a large and significant antidepressant effect – and yet the authors also found that many programmes dedicated to treating depression do not include exercise.

Analysing data from 49 studies involving 266,939 participants (with adjustments made for potential confounding factors — including age, gender, and smokers), the authors discovered that exercise reduced depression risk by 17%.

The importance of self-motivation

But nothing involving the mind is straightforward. And while exercise is good medicine, the act of doing it must be autonomous – done for its own sake – rather than being motivated by a sense of obligation, which often leads to people shirking their exercise routines.

Research exploring why exercise seems to have such a significant antidepressant effect is ongoing. However, specialists argue that physical activity’s positive effect on mental health could be linked to reduced inflammation, improved cellular health, and brain cell regeneration.

The suggestion echoes research conducted on rats, which showed that the brains of weight-trained rats produced enzymes and genetic markers known to kick-start the creation and survival of new neurons.