Chuck Hillman

That’s according to Charles Hillman, the co-director of the Center for Cognitive and Brain Health at Northeastern University in Boston. Hillman has been studying the relationship between exercise and cognition for decades and has generally found that making time for a 20-minute brisk walk can improve work performance and brain function.

“Think of that as about the pace of the walk to school in the morning,” says Charles Hillman, lead author of the study and associate director of the Center for Cognitive and Brain Health at Northeastern University.

Without physical education classes, opportunities for physical activity, and adult-led physical activity participation, it is highly likely that a large percentage of youth will not get their 60 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity recommended per day, according to Charles Hillman, PhD, of Northeastern University’s Center for Cognitive and Brain Health in Boston.

A new study, co-authored by Northeastern University professor Charles Hillman and Naiman Khan at the University of Illinois, found that drinking water and staying hydrated increased children’s ability to multitask and improved their reaction times.

Charles Hillman, a kinesiology professor at Northeastern University in Boston who studies the connection between the body and the brain, says there’s strong evidence that supports making physical education and recess a priority in schools. “The goal is to get kids moving throughout the school day,” Hillman said. While he grants that academic class time […]

But little has been known about visceral fat and brain health in children. For a soon-to-be-published study, researchers from Northeastern University in Boston and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign tracked hundreds of 8-to-10-year-old children in a nine-month after-school exercise program in Urbana. Lauren Raine, a postdoctoral researcher at Northeastern University who conducted the study […]

Human beings evolved to move. Our bodies, including our brains, were fine-tuned for endurance activities over millennia of stalking and chasing down prey. “We’ve engineered that out of our lives now,” says Charles Hillman, a psychology professor at Northeastern University who has spent decades studying the link between exercise and cognition. The toll our relatively […]

Making sure kids have good muscle fitness might also benefit their school performance, according to a recent U.S. study. Aerobic fitness has already been linked to better thinking abilities in pre-teen children, but the current study found an independent link between muscle fitness and kids’ performance on memory tests as well as their math and […]