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The inbox was busy.
Three days of mail piled into one theme: proof. You wanted to know if the lab work holds up out here. So I went back to the papers and read the small print.
One of them made me change my own mind…
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The Mailbag
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// Does It Hold
KAREN, 71: “The case for speed drills landed well here. Does the gain hold once the drills stop?”
Yes, if you keep dipping back in. A team at Johns Hopkins linked that trial to Medicare files. They tracked 2,021 adults for twenty years. The speed arm who came back for top-up rounds held the edge. Sixty percent of them had no dementia on record at the end. In the no-drill group it was fifty-one percent.
And the speed folk who skipped their top-ups? They matched the control group. So the gain acts like a gym pass… not a tattoo.
ADULTS: 2,021 · SPAN: 20 years · HAZARD RATIO: 0.75
→ Source: Coe and colleagues, Alzheimer’s & Dementia TRCI, 2026
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// Walk Or Run
PIOTR, 58: “I own no bike at all. Would a brisk walk at the four hour mark do the same job?”
A walk gets part of the way there. The four hour rule came from a Dutch lab that used hard bike bouts. A pair at Northumbria then took the question outdoors. They asked adult runners to learn a word list twice, two weeks apart. One session had a run in the half hour after. The next had a walk.
Recall was checked at thirty minutes and again at one day. Both bouts lifted mood and alertness… but the run won both checks. So a walk still counts. Push the heart rate up when you can, and walk when you cannot.
DESIGN: within-subject · CHECKS: 30 min, 24 hr · WINNER: the run
→ Source: Makepeace and Craig, PLOS ONE, 2024
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// Above The Neck
DANA, 63: “My son puts creatine in his shake. Is there a case for it above the neck?”
A small case, and an honest one. Sixteen trials were pooled in 2024, with 492 adults across them. Memory scores rose by a modest margin. Speed of thought got quicker too. But the pooled mark for broad brain power did not budge.
Then a letter in the same journal flagged a counting flaw in the math. Some trials fed in more than one score from the same people. That can pad an effect. So creatine may support memory a bit. Sweeping claims about thinking are not backed yet.
TRIALS: 16 · ADULTS: 492 · MEMORY EFFECT: SMD 0.31
→ Source: Xu and colleagues, Frontiers in Nutrition, 2024
→ Source: Citherlet commentary, Frontiers in Nutrition, 2026
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// The Count
The Four Hour Ride Took It
Most of the mail that named a pick went with the ride. Speed drills came in second, and by a nose.
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// The Spotlight
Greg And The Spanish Deck
Greg is 66 and lives near Leeds. He has been at Spanish for a year, mostly with flash cards. Two weeks back he tried the four hour gap. Cards at nine in the morning. A hard row at one.
He wrote in to say the words held better on day two. His words… the deck felt lighter. One man is not a trial. But it is a fair way to test a rule on yourself.
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Pick the block: one study session you would sit down for anyway. |
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Set the gap: four hours on a kitchen timer, so the clock does the thinking. |
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Work hard for half an hour: bike, row or run at a pace that makes talk tough. |
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Check the deck at two days: that is when the lab found its gap. |
→ Source: van Dongen and colleagues, Current Biology, 2016
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I spend north of $20,000 a year on the same deep research desks that hedge funds read. Most of what lands there never makes the letter. The filter earned its keep on the creatine question. That paper looked clean until the letter in the same journal turned up.
And I run these on myself first. My rows come four hours after study, three days out of seven.
Keep the mail coming.
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