Most of us have experienced the link between mental health and exercise, whether your burst of feel-good endorphins is coming from a 45-minute HIIT workout or a walk around the block. Exercise can quickly improve your mood and also help you combat the effects of chronic mental health issues (although it’s definitely not a cure or a replacement for professional treatment or medication). Research also suggests that exercise is associated with lower risk of long-term brain health problems, including dementia and Alzheimer’s. So it’s fair to ask, what else can exercise do for our brains? Recent research is looking at the correlation between exercise and memory, and there’s a few interesting new revelations to know.

Exercise can impact your memory in the short term — as in, a single workout can help improve your memory — and the long term, with exercise potentially providing some protection against future memory problems as you age. But as we know, different types of workouts affect your brain in different ways. You probably feel much different mentally after a 30-minute run than after a 30-minute yoga practice. Could exercise and memory work the same way? In other words, could different types of exercise affect your memory in different ways?

A recent study from Dartmouth, published in August in the journal Nature, asked exactly that question.

In the study, researchers looked at a year of Fitbit data from 113 participants. Each participant completed a series of immediate and delayed memory tests, including remembering random lists of words (free recall), the narrative of a short video (naturalistic recall), words in a foreign language, and the positions of different shapes (spatial learning). Then they looked for patterns between performance on the memory tests and participants’ exercise patterns, including length, intensity, and frequency of workouts.