Sparked!

Why hasn’t every school teacher and principal and child psychologist read Spark?  Why hasn’t every parent?  Why didn’t the president get on TV and tell us about it?

Okay, I know that we have all known for a long time that exercise is critical for, well, for almost everything.  But I never saw it all laid out so concisely and convincingly. Spark does that.

Remember all of the executive functions that I wrote about in Ellen Galinsky’s excellent book Mind in the Making?  She had some great ideas on how to improve them.  And just reading about how important those functions are reoriented my homeschool priorities.  But what I hadn’t heard until I read Spark was how important exercise is for improving all of those functions.

So how does it work?  Exercise improves learning by:

1. Increasing the production of neurotransmitters that improve alertness, attention, and motivation.
2. Preparing and pumping nerve cells to bind to one another (this is essentially what learning is, building connections between nerve cells).
3. Spurring the development of new nerve cells from the stem cells in the hippocampus.

In other words, the brain is plastic — it can grow or diminish, work more or less effectively — and exercise helps it to grow and work better.

The doctor’s ideal plan?  It’s a little complicated and it changes a bit depending on what your goals are.  But his basic recommendation is:

• Choose a sport that simultaneously taxes the cardiovascular system and the brain, a sport like tennis.  Or do a ten-minute aerobic activity, followed by something skills based, like rock climbing, figure skating, or karate.
• Work out at least four times a week, and get your heart rate up to 60-70% of maximum for 30 minutes two to three times a week.

We’ve only built regular, vigorous exercise into the homeschool routine for a few weeks, but already I see that they are starting to get how important it is for them. When Ezra was jumping from couch to couch and working up a sweat last night, I heard him say, “I’m getting myself ready to calm down.”

And when we arrived in Virginia tonight after 10+ hours in the car, they ran immediately downstairs to wrestle with their cousins.  Of course, they probably would have done that before I got all Sparked up for homeschool.  So maybe the person who is really starting to get it is me.