Physical fitness has been long associated with maintenance and improvement of motor performance as we age. In particular, measures of psychomotor speed and motor dexterity tend to be higher in physically fit aging adults as compared to their sedentary counterparts. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), we explored the patterns of neural ...

The global epidemic of obesity and physical inactivity may have detrimental implications for young people's cognitive function and academic achievement. This prospective study investigated whether childhood motor function predicts later academic achievement via physical activity, fitness, and obesity. The study sample included 8,061 children from the Northern Finland Birth Cohort 1986, which co...

Physically active lifestyles have become increasingly rare in developed countries, while endurance and neuromuscular performance have declined and the prevalence of overweight among children and youth has increased in recent decades. Sedentary lifestyles may not only be associated with increased cardiometabolic risk but also less optimal circumstances for cognitive development and academic achi...

Physical fitness is a powerful marker of health in youth. Studies in adolescents and adults suggest that higher fat mass is related to worse physical fitness. However, there is limited knowledge whether fat mass and fat-free mass are associated with physical fitness already in preschoolers. Baseline data from the MINISTOP (Mobile-based INtervention Intended to STop Obesity in Preschoolers) tria...

Reaching late adulthood is accompanied by losses in physical and mental resources, but lifestyle choices seem to have a considerable influence on the aging trajectory. This review deals with the interplay between cognitive and motor functioning in old age, focusing on two different lines of research, namely (a) dual-task studies requiring participants to perform a cognitive and a motor task sim...

AIM The aim of the current research was to explore the relationship between motor competence, physical fitness and self-perception, and to study to which extent this relationship may vary by gender. METHODS A sample of 67 children (mean age 11.46 years, SD 0.27) completed Harter's Self-Perception Profile for Children (SPPC), the Movement Assessment Battery for Children (MABC) and the Test of ...

Physical fitness is the quality of the whole body in terms of its state of adaptation to physical activity. Physical fitness implies more than one task and is usually meant to include not only the activities of everyday life but also emergencies in which a person is un-expectedly called up to perform activities demanding unusual , unexpenditure of strength energy and adoptive ability under extr...

What is bodily fitness and how does it affect brain fitness? Compelling evidence indicates that the two are closely related, especially in older age (Colcombe & Kramer, 2003; Colcombe et al., 2004). Indeed, the cognitive benefits of physical fitness through cardiovascular and strength training have been demonstrated cross-sectionally, longitudinally, and by intervention studies, thereby constit...