The title of today’s post was a spur of the moment choice of two words, cognitive and rowing, as the words to use when searching for an image to paste at the top of this day’s blog post.
The above image was one of the top results when I searched images for “cognitive rowing” and it was found on an appropriate web page, which has information about exercise being good for the brain. The website is called Mother Nature Network and the particular article is called Exercise Keeps Your Brain Young. I scanned the article but didn’t actually read it because it looked like information I had already been exposed to years ago. But if its news to you that exercise benefits your brain, then give it a read.
The indoor rowing activity today was 12K done while watching two more lectures on cognitive neuroscience. The 12K wasn’t the same as the one done yesterday while watching lectures, however. Today was done differently in that the first 15 minutes was easy rowing for warmup and then the rest of the session alternated between rowing fast for 30 seconds and rowing easy for 150 seconds and repeating that twelve times, using an automatic interval timer to signal each of the time intervals.
Hard rowing requires more mental effort than easy rowing and I discovered that the activity of multi-tasking between trying to focus on what the lecturer was saying and the task of rowing as hard as I could for 30 seconds each time the timer announced it was time to do so… resulted in a slight degrading of the outcomes of both activities. I comprehended less of what was being said during each of the twelve 30 second hard-rowing intervals. Also, I didn’t row as hard as I could have during each of those 30 second intervals, because I was simultaneously trying to pay attention to the lecture.
It was educational in more ways than just what was presented in the lectures.
Happy rowing to you while you keep your brain young.