If you have to solve tricky tasks, you burn more calories: Is this widespread assumption true?
A personal trainer explains the connections.
Do you practice brain teasers at work every day, do you like to solve difficult crossword puzzles or learn a new instrument?
After a lesson, a particularly difficult puzzle or a hard day at work, your head smokes.
But can it be that, thanks to brain exercises, the pounds also shed?
“Yes and no” is the answer from personal trainer and sports scientist Jörn Giersberg.
Compared to the portal
Fitbook
with the health insurance company DAK as a health
partner
, he explains that mental exercise does not deserve its name with regard to the calorie
balance
.
The brain consumes a large part of the energy in the body (around twenty percent of the total energy), but it also does so when relaxing.
A difficult brain teaser results in higher energy consumption in the brain, but this is slightly higher than in a relaxed state.
The additional consumption is somewhere between one and 100 calories per hour, as
Fitbook
informs.
Increase fitness with the right brain teasers
But what happens in the body if I only imagine exercises and do not do them physically?
According to Giersberg, smaller studies would show that there is indeed an effect here.
The fact that muscle groups can be strengthened through the power of thought alone is not a new finding.
As early as 2001, researchers led by Guang Yue from the Cleveland Clinic Foundation in Ohio showed
that mental training can also make arm muscles grow
, as
Spiegel
reported at the time.
Together with his colleagues, the researcher had already found out that just thinking about appropriate training builds a muscle in the little finger, the report said.
Fitness survey
Muscle gain of almost 14 percent just from thinking about exercise
But not only the finger muscles, also larger muscles benefit from mental training. In their study, the researchers led by Yue found that the study participants developed more strength in their biceps after just 14 days. The subjects had performed mental gymnastics five times a week. The researchers monitored whether the study participants did not inadvertently tense their arm muscles.
After 14 days, the researchers found an average muscle gain of 13.5 percent.
No muscle gain was found in the control group of people who did not do any mental training.
Even brief tensing of the muscles is useful, says sports scientist Jörn Giersberg
: “In bodybuilding, for example, muscles are simply tensed during training breaks in order to further sensitize the brain-muscle connection.
If you address a muscle, it becomes more sensitive and then also reacts better during training ”.
Recreational athletes could also take advantage of this by thinking about their muscles as often as possible and / or tensing them more often.
(jg)
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