The Sweaty Genius Method to Rebuilding Your Brain

This is your brain on exercise.

I wanted to begin today’s topic by illustrating the brain vs. brawn debate with Marvel characters, but due to ChatGPT’s limitations, this was the best I could come up with.

Definitely more humorous than horrifying…but only slightly.

Let’s see how well you guessed each character:

• Top Left: MODOK

• Top Right: Professor X

• Bottom Right: Hulk

• Bottom Left: Juggernaut (yes, I know this picture has like 0% of his features…AI’s a work in progress)

Now, I’ve always been partial to Professor X. Growing up, I was the chubby, straight-A student quietly sitting in the back of the classroom. A guy who solely relied on his mind appealed to me. It felt like the kind of power I would have in that universe.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, there’s The Incredible Hulk, a 2,000lb force of nature. His body is his identity — to the detriment of everything else.

Two characters couldn't be more different, and in many ways, they exemplify a bias we still carry in society: that we have limited resources to build our bodies and brains, and to really succeed, we can only choose one.

Body or brain. Smart or strong.

Well, that’s bullshit. And not only is it bs, it’s curtailing your ability to win in the area you really want. They need each other. Like a couple of lovesick teenagers grounded from using their phones. Desperate. That’s how bad your brain wants your body to get up and move.

Here’s why.

All Problems Are Learning Problems

Your brain looks like it does a lot of things, but in reality, it just does one thing really, really well: transmit information.

It sends little blips of electricity across neurons (about 80+ billion of them) that translate into all kinds of things (speaking, moving, feeling, etc.).

The whole mess of it can be boiled down to two simple concepts: the physical structure of your brain and the chemical makeup of your brain. Awesome things happen when these are working well. Terrible stuff when they’re not.

Learning is the word we use to broadly describe the awesome scenario: your chemicals are “balanced” or in equilibrium, and the physical elements are growing – forming new attachments and pathways, optimizing the beneficial ones, and shuttering the not-so-good ones.

Like all living things, a brain is either growing or dying. Except we might say learning or shriveling.¹

This will all make more sense if we draw some pictures.

A Brain Lookbook

First, here’s what an actual neuron looks like. Don’t worry, there’s no quiz at the end. I just wanted you to have a point of reference before you see the carnage that follows.

Source: Mental Health America

The dendrite end typically receives signals, while the axon terminal end sends them. Here's my version.

When you feel stressed or depressed, the chemicals in your brain are out of balance. Depending on your unique history and biology, it’s a bit of a chicken or the egg problem. Some people are most susceptible to these chemicals not cooperating, while others have superhero-level tolerances by default. 

Given enough exposure to this imbalance, your connections “retract.” The over-supply of certain chemicals essentially burns off the ends of the neurons your brain has worked so hard to make, and they start to look like this.

“The shutdown in depression is a shutdown of learning.”
— John Ratey

With fewer connections available, your brain blips follow the only paths available to them – leading to an inevitable doom loop.

We feel stuck because our brains physically are.

The problems of anxiety and addiction push in the opposite direction. They tend to occur when “the brain has learned something too well.”²

A different type of chemical imbalance pushes the little tendrils of our neurons into areas they shouldn’t go, creating additional connections but in negative ways.

In anxiety, the networks responsible for fight or flight (or freeze) “overgrow” and build bridges to mundane activities like talking to people or going outside. Our anxious button develops a hair trigger that nearly anything can set off – because the branches have reached across so much of our brains.

In addiction, it’s a similar growth problem – except they not only reach further (multiplying the reasons we go back to our addiction), but they also grow thicker (cementing the strength of our addiction).

And if I made these all sound like separate issues, they’re not.

Anxiety leads to depression, stress to addiction, and so on, all because our learning has gone haywire. Overactivity in some parts leads to shutdowns in others. Fewer routes lead to bad habits reinforcing undesirable growth. And around it goes… unless we stop it.

Regardless of how you might be feeling right now, you should know that your brain works fine. It’s just that, in trying to help you survive and cope and adapt, it misstepped. It learned incorrectly.

The good news is that it followed a process. And we can use that same process to fix everything.

Exercise is Forced Learning

"Miracle-Gro for the brain" is what Dr. John J. Ratey calls exercise again and again throughout his book Spark.

And for good reason.

Exercise is a growth hack (like a real one). When you move your body (we’ll talk about how much and often below), your brain gets excited. This is what it was made to do – to move you through the world in the best, safest, most efficient way possible.³

Because exercise gets your brain “in the zone,” a few really good things happen automatically.⁴

First, your chemicals balance – improving attention, motivation, and mood. You can imagine a doctor whipping up the perfect cocktail of pills, because chemically, that’s exactly what happens to a brain that exercises regularly. It becomes a self-fulfilling pharmacy. 

Second, your brain repairs damage. This could mean fixing broken connections, clearing blocked roads, and identifying bad connectors. Your brain heals itself, just like any other part of your body with a cut or a bruise.

And lastly, your brain builds new connections (neurogenesis) strategically. It taps into what you want and pushes your neurons to make it so. It's why you feel clear-headed after a good workout. Problems seem easier to solve. Your emotions don't run so hot. It's because your brain built you a road forward.

One last picture to drive this home.

We talked above about how anxiety and fear and addiction can be the result of “bad” connections – parts of your brain overgrowing in unproductive ways. Well, exercise not only severs the unproductive ties over time, it proactively pushes growth around the unhelpful neurons.

In the picture, the small, penciled neuron is our bad guy. His only job is to ruin your day. We’ll call him Toby.

Toby wants to pull as many resources as possible towards him and through his pathway because it makes him stronger. He’s also incredibly stubborn, so he’s not leaving without a fight.

What your clever brain does is go around Toby. It sprouts branches that circumvent his path. These are the blue dudes in the sketch. The good guys.

With a little time and persistence, Toby withers away. Starved out by the competition.

Every time you intentionally engage your body, all of this happens in your brain. It resets. Reconfigures. And realigns with who you really are — not who stress or depression or anxiety have made you out to be.

You literally learn to be yourself again.

Becoming a Sweaty Genius

Ok, I wanted to pop this in because I think it’s an interesting addition based on the available research.

Quick disclaimer before we dive in: Every body is different. What works best for you and your goals will differ from pretty much everyone else you work out with in the gym. You'll change, too, so give yourself some grace. What follows are guidelines for optimizing mental fitness – nothing else. Obviously, there are other things to consider, and this routine may come at the cost of those.

Cool, all that aside, let’s talk numbers.

• On average, a full neurogenesis cycle takes 3 weeks. This means a 21-day habit can significantly change your brain’s trajectory.

• Intensity varies by weight and age, but a good baseline to try and hit each week is a calorie burn of 8 times your body weight (i.e., if you weigh 150lbs, you should aim to burn 1,200 calories through exercise per week).

• Your brain responds best to frequency of challenge, so aiming to exercise 6 days a week will optimize your results. Only 2 of those 6 days should be at a particularly high intensity.

Timing-wise, most of these workouts should fall in the 30–60-minute range. The high-intensity days will be on the lower end of that or even below it (e.g., a 20-minute sprint interval).

What this framework will do is codify all those good things we talked about above into how your brain operates, setting a new default. The chemicals will balance. The neurons will build. And you’ll find that your brain is just…better. Quicker. Less noisy. More positive.

Your mind will finally be on your side.

More Play-Doh Than Porcelain

The word neuroplasticity made its way into our common language because a metric ton of books were published on the subject all around the same time.

Some were great. Others, pretty boring. But the idea, the core concept that the thing inside our heads is malleable, sculptable… That’s worth holding onto.⁵

The brain you have is the brain you’ve made.

If you want a different one, you can do that too.

1. From Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain by John J. Ratey, MD with Eric Hagerman. Page 223.

2. Page 172.

3. “Only a mobile creature needs a brain.” It’s a wild quote Ratey pulls from neurophysiologist Rodolfo Llinas.

4. Page 53.

5. The Play-Doh line is from page 35. That whole section is just so motivating.