Here is yet another great reason to exercise that has nothing to do with your heart, circulation system or resistance to disease etc:
University of Pittsburg researchers recruited 120 sedentary older people without dementia and randomly placed them in one of two groups—those who began an exercise regimen of walking around a track for 40 minutes a day, three days a week, or those limited to stretching and toning exercises.
Magnetic resonance images were collected before the intervention, after six months, and at the end of the one-year study.
Brain images show that the aerobic exercise group demonstrated an increase in volume of the left and right hippocampus of 2.12 percent and 1.97 percent, respectively. The same regions of the brain in those who did stretching exercises decreased in volume by 1.40 and 1.43 percent, respectively.
So, no matter what age you are, if you are doing nothing, you should get up off your backside and get outdoors before it is too late.