Exercise and Executive Functioning

By J.D. Ball, Ph.D., ABPP

Regularly moving the body has immediate, protective, long-lasting, benefits for executive functioning and brain health.

We have long known that impatience, inattention, overactivity, and distractibility associated with ADHD creates a buzz saw of activity in homes and schools that threaten to overwhelm parents, teachers, and care providers, especially those who fail to give adequate time to physical activity. For much of my career, exercise was seen to be valuable for its powers in providing to children a needed release. Some viewed it, usually with more hope than merit, as a means of inducing fatigue as a path to settling symptoms. Parents on family road trips would require children in the back seat to “run it off” at rest stops in the feint hope that the kids would then sleep for a few hundred miles.

Now, there is a wealth of new evidence for even more extraordinary benefits of physical exercise as a direct means of enhancing executive functioning (working memory, attention, response inhibition, planning, flexible thinking, etc.) in children, adolescents, young adults...

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