According to a team of researchers, physical activity, which keeps body fit and healthy, is very essential for maintaining a healthy brain.

Researchers found that any form of exercises, to grow muscle or just a regular exercise, can help maintain a healthy brain. They said that exercises can have apositive effect on brain and significantly improve cognitive functions. They found that exercise releases hormones that triggers brain development and can help keep brains sharp at older age.

Lead study author Hideaki Soya along with colleagues from the University of Tsukuba, Japan worked to determine link between brain health, cognitive function, physical fitness and the role of exercises. They explained that young people use right side of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) for temporary storage and manipulation while older people use both right and left side of PFC for the same purpose. They tried to study if physical exercises helped brain at older age to retain certain properties of young brains.

The researcher included men older than 60 years with variable physical fitness and they were asked to go through colour-word matching Stroop test where some words in different colours are displayed on the board and person has to read the colour of the word rather than reading the word written on the board. They studied the accuracy and reaction time of each participant.

They concluded that people who exercised regularly used left part of their PFC indicating that they still had some features of young mind.