MTB to grow a better brain

Came across this video about how mountain biking (in particular) is great for your brain. Well as long as you try to learn new stuff anyway.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhZ5oLT2sn8

Found it a total inspiration for an older guy like me to just keep going. Has a clip of 76 yr old North Shore Betty who is still tearing it up.

Key things I found from it are:

Frustration helps to build new skills, along with repetition, focus and rest is key.
Keep to shortish sessions at a time.
Don’t give up.
Eat well.
Sleep.

It really does tap into the things you should do when learning anything new. The focus and rest thing really does work, the mind is like a muscle, it does the hard work when you sleep/rest.

Anyway, I’m off to practice this manual thing…

… just don’t faceplant. Concussion does not grow a better brain.

Interesting. It would be good if someone asked that professor about mountain biking specifically. It seems the video presenter is assuming mountain biking fits the profile of the activities that the professor describes, i.e. it’s a hypothesis. I think it has a good chance of being proven true though!

I’ve recently been reading about ADHD, and it has been discovered that improving your physical balance skills helps with ADHD. This is because it’s the same area of the brain that processes physical coordination as helps with mental and emotional coordination. Also keeping at and completing things that are hard helps you complete future tasks.

I can also say from my own experiences that mountain biking less has a direct collaboration to a decline in mental wellbeing

Also I’m sure the sleep thing is true. Seen it in myself and the kids. E.g. not being able to ride a bike one day to pedalling off on it straight away a few days later!

I struggle to believe that this is a MTB specific thing – I think the same benefits can be found in a few different activities/hobbbies etc…

It’s the decision to learn, practice, rest, recover and repeat without ‘giving up’ that helps both brain and body. Especially important as we age.

I’m happy to believe that mountain biking can do this – as I enjoy riding a bike off-road :o)

I struggle to believe that this is a MTB specific thing

The professor’s video and the MTB presenter’s surmising are entirely separate things. The presenter has used clips from another video/podcast to illustrate their hypothesis (in layman’s terms their “theory”. Though in scientific terms a theory is something fully proven that explains how something occurs). No evidence is presented that says MTBing will do this…. but it does make sense that it could.

Any excuse for more MTB is good in my book.

MTB is probably quite different for each person too:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30283372/

Combining exercise and getting out into the natural world has a lot of benefits!

Morris dancing works as well, apparently.

Morris dancing works as well, apparently.

For some reason my first thought was “how could we combine the two?” (morris dancing and mtb)

Why, just why

but it does make sense that it could.

But only if you can get past the frustration aspect to be able to consistently practice skills that are frustrating to learn. Frustrating because often they’re the type of skills which look easy and unimpressive, and may not be particularly exciting to practice. Particularly frustrating if balance and proprioception don’t come naturally to you in the first place. Often leaving one feeling foolish for finding it difficult to ride along a plank of wood on the ground, or hold the front wheel against the wall in a trackstand variation, while on social media you have RedBull sponsored riders doing their thing. Took me a long time to get to the stage where frustration wasn’t frustrating, where the mistakes made during the learning process weren’t so frustrating I was unable to embrace them. The mental side of it is a major aspect.