Photo courtesy of justb

I just came back from a 1 hour walk, and I feel great! There’s nothing like the feeling you get after a good walk, run, strength training routine, or a workout at the gym. Another thing this accomplishes is that it is that you achieved your exercise goal, which in turn energizes your day, and puts a smile on your face till your next workout.

But, is this feeling real? For years, people have reported a feeling of euphoria after a workout, but science had yet to prove it.

Well, that has now changed.

In a recent article in the New York Times, medical technology has caught up with exercise lore. Researchers in Germany, using advances in neuroscience, report in the current issue of the journal Cerebral Cortex that the folk belief is true:

Running does elicit a flood of endorphins in the brain. The endorphins are associated with mood changes, and the more endorphins a runner’s body pumps out, the greater the effect. And other scientists not involved with this study concur with the results.

“Impressive,” said Dr. Solomon Snyder, a neuroscience professor at Johns Hopkins and a discoverer of endorphins in the 1970’s.

“I like it,” said Huda Akil, a professor of neurosciences at the University of Michigan. “This is the first time someone took this head on. It wasn’t that the idea was not the right idea. It was that the evidence was not there.”

For people who exercise, the study offers a sort of vindication that runner’s high is not just a New Age excuse for their claims of feeling good after a hard workout.

For people who don’t exercise, now there’s another reason to exercise, in addition to all of the other health benefits. As the season changes to spring, more opportunities will present themselves for outside workouts.

Open the door to your endorphins because,

After all, it’s about a healthy lifestyle!

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