The study found that less fit students had worse long term memories than their fitter counterparts. Participants who had fatter body compositions and less aerobic capacity, performed worse a test of long-term memory. Participants were asked to memorize word pairs until they could reliably remember at least a few groups. Then, after at least 24 hours, they were asked to perform the same memory test.
“These findings contribute to a larger body of research that has begun to indicate that cardiorespiratory fitness may be important for the optimal functioning of multiple aspects of high-level cognitive and memory processes,” concluded the researchers. In other words, poor fitness impacts at least one critical area of our intelligence and could be related to even more.