Exercise to Rebuild Your Mind

Get moving to speed up recovery from a stroke.

Despite the physical challenges you may be facing, physical activity may be the top way to regain abilities that were impaired by your stroke. “You can rewire the brain quickly and robustly, and in a way that has profound changes,” says Peter G. Levine, codirector of the Drake Center’s Neuromotor Recovery and Rehabilitation Laboratory at the University of Cincinnati Academic Medical Center and author of “Stronger After Stroke: Your Roadmap to Recovery.” Essential to that mental remapping, he states, is exercise.

Think a stroke means you can’t exercise? Think again, advises Joel Stein, MD, of Columbia University’s Department of Rehabilitation and chief of rehabilitation at New York Presbyterian Hospital. “Even for people who are significantly weakened on one side,” he continues, “there are ways that they can do more sustained exercise — by using a modified bicycle or just by walking.”

MORE: Stretching Exercises

Stretch Your Mind
Our brain cells are constantly rearranging themselves. When we learn something, a cluster of neurons gets assigned to that activity, and they forge pathways with one another in order to communicate. Exercise helps our brain cells become more flexible and make those connections, explains John J. Ratey, MD, author of “Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain.”

During a stroke, you lose a small percentage of your neurons and whatever function was associated with those cells. If you’ve lost the ability to walk, for instance, you can regain that ability by reassigning the task to new neurons. The more flexible your brain is, the easier time it will have doing this — studies show that those who exercised regularly prior to their stroke have an easier time recovering.

Train Your Brain
So how do you reassign your neurons? The same way you get to Carnegie Hall: Practice, practice, practice. Repetition is essential to regaining function. The more often you perform a task, the more brain cells that will get assigned to that activity and the deeper the memory will get wired into the brain. If it’s not done often enough, though, the neurons will disconnect from one another and the memory will be lost. That’s why, for stroke survivors, exercise also means practicing task-specific movements as often as possible, like opening and closing a hand that has lost its ability to grasp.