How does Exercise Improve ADHD Symptoms?

We know exercise is good for us.

Everyone and their mum has been saying this for donkeys’ years.

From improving heart health, to mood, to metabolism — exercise impacts pretty much every aspect of our lives for the better.

But did you know that it has some specific effects that are of particular value to us ADHDers?

Let’s take a look how exercise can improve, or mitigate, some the most prominent ADHD symptoms:

1/ Improves attention itself

Attention. It’s in the name.

Even if we might dispute the ‘deficit’ part — (ahem, hyperfocus?) — it’s pretty clear that our big issue is related to how we manage our attention.

And as it turns out, exercise is straight-up fantabulous at improving this aspect of our condition:

In one study published in the Journal PLoS ONE, it was shown that just 5 minutes of intense exercise could improve attention in individuals with ADHD by 30%!

That’s a massive difference vs baseline, comparable to medication, even.

2/ Improves processing speed/reaction times

You ever find that sometimes it takes you a moment to understand or properly hear what someone is saying to you? 

That’s likely due to ADHD’s impact on our ability to process or react to stimuli.

But according to a study in the Journal of Sport and Health Science:

“Acute exercise improves speed of processing in children with and without ADHD.”

Likewise, a study in Frontiers in Psychiatry showed a similar result in ADHD adults — just 30 minutes of moderate exercise dramatically increased their reaction times.

3/ Improves inhibition response

One often quite distressing symptom of ADHD is our lowered inhibition response.

This is the reason we find ourselves doing silly or even dangerous things without thinking,

It’s why we can often interrupt people in conversations.

The good news is that exercise can help here too.

According to another study in PLoS One, a session of intense, localised resistance training can significantly improve inhibition responses.

Study participants were asked to complete a ‘Stroop test’ (the one where you have to select the right word for the colour shown, but the word is written in a different colour) before and after an intense workout.

For those participants who had performed a highly intense workout (HRE in the image below) inhibition response was measured and shown to improve dramatically based on their ability to:

a) select the correct answer
b) do so in a quick timeframe.

so therefore the ‘interference’ caused by the Stroop test (which equates to a participant’s ability to manage inhibition) was minimised by intense exercise.

Though this study wasn’t conducted on individuals with ADHD, it is likely we would respond similarly.

4/Improves Short-term memory

ADHD’s most prominent symptoms centre around its impact on our ‘Executive Functions’ .

 essentially, these are the day-to-day processes that our brain should do automatically and easily.

but For us ADHDers, this often isn’t the case.

One example where we struggle is with short-term memory.

 there’s a reason why us forgetting where we’ve put our keys is a bit of a meme now.

Well, the good news is that exercise can help here too!

A study published in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews shows the impact of both acute and long-term cardio exercise on memory function.

According to the study, acute exercise helps to ‘(prime) the molecular processes involved in the encoding and consolidation of newly acquired information’ .

whilst long-term exercise ‘has negligible effects on memory but provides the necessary stimuli to optimize the responses of the molecular machinery responsible for memory processing’.

In other words, short-term exercise acts almost like petrol in a car — firing the ‘memory engine’ and driving the motor, while long-term exercise acts like engine oil — lubricating the necessary parts used in memory formation.

5/ Increases Motivation

I’ve written a whole separate post here on the topic of ADHD motivation and exercise, but suffice to say, this is one of those classic Catch-22 symptoms.

If you exercise, your motivation increases. But in order to exercise, you need motivation.

Great.

A bit of a cosmic joke that, eh?

Well, thankfully there are ways to increase motivation TO exercise, which I detail in that other post, but in terms of getting the motivation benefits FROM exercise, the positive news is, it only requires 20 minutes of moderate exercise.

Yes, just 20 minutes of exercise will boost your motivation levels, both for more exercise and for other aspects of your life.

Final thoughts

These are by no means the only positive impacts of exercise on ADHD symptoms, but they are some of the most beneficial.

If there was a pill that increased attention, processing speed, inhibition response, memory and motivation, it would rightly be hailed as something between Ritalin and the pill from Limitless.

Exercise can do all that and more.

No, it’s not a cure for ADHD, but as a support, you can’t get much better.

Want to start getting some of these positive effects from exercise? LEt’s chat about how I can help you find your fit.