This is what Linda Ruth Wheeldon, a professor of language at the University of Agder (UiA), says.

She has examined the relationship between fitness and language comprehension in older women and men. Assisting her were researchers in language and sport from UiA and the University of Birmingham.

According to Wheeldon, this study is the first to clearly show that being fit can positively affect language understanding in older people.

Tested before and after six months of training

Data from 160 healthy older people aged 60 and over were analyzed in the study.

80 were from Birmingham in England and only spoke one language.

The other 80 were from Kristiansand and spoke two languages. Norwegian was their first language, and they were good at English as their second language.

Half of the participants from the two places did exercise training for six months. The other half did not exercise. This gave researchers a solid basis for comparing progress between the training and control groups.

Language and fitness were tested before and after the training period ended.

The training was followed up

Sports scientist Sindre Herskedal Fosstveit and colleagues at UiA are behind the exercise programme and fitness tests in the experiment.

The training was home-based. The older adults logged their sessions. They were all given pulse watches and heart rate belts. Fosstveit could check heart rates and other data from the exercise sessions through their watches. In addition, they received individual follow-up once a month.

Uphill intervals and body weight circuit training

There were three sessions per week, with individual adjustments. Each session lasted 40-60 minutes, including warm-up and cool-down.

One of the sessions was interval training twice a week. Participants walked briskly uphill for two minutes before taking a break and repeating the exercise. Initially, they walked up and down five times. The intervals were gradually increased as they got in better shape.

The other session was circuit training once a week. The goal was to combine strength exercises with increased heart rate. The older adults performed six different strength exercises, each repeated three times for 45 seconds.

Head, heart and muscles need air

Circuit training is a form of exercise that can improve both fitness and muscle endurance.

"By alternating between different exercises with short breaks, the body is challenged to maintain effort and intensity over time. This makes the muscles more enduring," says the sports scientist.

He reminds us that maximum oxygen uptake is a measure of an individual's fitness. The more oxygen the body is able to transport to the muscles and utilize during physical activity, the better your fitness.

Differences between monolinguals and bilinguals

"The training groups in both places followed the programme. They increased their fitness, that is their maximal oxygen uptake, by 7 per cent compared to the control groups," says Fosstveit.

Control groups that did not train made little to no progress. Many performed worse on the second test of language and fitness.

The participants in the bilingual group that trained did not make any progress on the language tests. This was in stark contrast to what the researchers expected.

So, the results of the language tests differed between the groups training in Kristiansand and Birmingham.

More difficult with two languages?

The monolinguals in Birmingham made progress while the bilinguals in Kristiansand did not.

Researchers believe the difference may arise because it’s difficult to process multiple languages simultaneously. Bilinguals must always suppress interference from their second language to solve a task.

Language researcher Eunice Fernandes was responsible for the language study at UiA. She emphasizes that more research is needed on individuals who speak multiple languages to understand this connection.

"We know that bilinguals need extra skills to control their language use. This might take longer than thinking in one language," says Fernandes.

They discovered keywords faster

The language tests required participants to focus and recognize specific words in spoken sentences. Researchers told them beforehand which words to quickly identify.

The sentences were designed so that the words were either easy or difficult to recognize. Sometimes the words appeared in lists of random words. Sometimes the words were part of sentences with normal grammatical structure. And occasionally the sentence structure helped make the words easier to discover just before they appeared.

Simply put, the different sentences allowed researchers to investigate several aspects: how quickly older adults perceived the structure of a text and how fast they understood its meaning.

7 per cent faster with better fitness

The training group in Birmingham was 30 milliseconds (7 per cent) faster in identifying and understanding words in spoken texts. The control group there was only 8 milliseconds faster (1.8 per cent).

"7 per cent is a significant finding, even if 30 milliseconds doesn’t sound like much. I believe the progress on the language tests would have been even greater if the participants had been in worse shape before we started the training period," says Fernandes.

She hopes more people will become aware of the relationship between exercise and language.

"The research is also about spreading the knowledge that physical exercise contributes to mental fitness and a good everyday life for older adults," says Fernandes