Do brain training apps actually make you sharper in everyday life?
Brain training games reliably make you better at the games. Whether that sharpness travels into the rest of your life is a genuinely open question, and it is the question worth asking before you subscribe to anything. This page sets out the criticism of seated brain training fairly, then explains what the evidence supports instead, and where Stridemind fits.
By Ibrahim Shahzad, maker of Stridemind. Last reviewed August 22, 2026. Every figure on this page was checked against the original paper it comes from, not a summary of it.
The criticism is about transfer, not about effort.
Nobody disputes that practising a memory puzzle makes you better at that memory puzzle. That is real learning, and there is nothing wrong with enjoying it. The argument is about how far the improvement travels, which researchers call transfer. Gains tend to stay close to the trained task. Getting faster at matching shapes on a tablet does not reliably make you steadier crossing a road, because a quiet room and a touchscreen never rehearse the combination that real life demands, which is thinking while your body is busy.
This is not a fringe complaint. It became a consumer-protection matter in January 2016, when the US Federal Trade Commission announced a settlement with Lumos Labs, the maker of Lumosity, over advertising the agency said the company could not support. Lumos Labs paid $2 million and agreed to hold reliable scientific evidence before making future claims about mental health benefits. We mention it because it is the clearest public marker of where the burden of proof sits, and because the same burden applies to us.
The useful question to ask any training product, including this one, is not “did the score go up?” It is “did anything outside the app get better, and how would we know?”
What happens when the thinking and the moving happen together.
If mental exercise helps and physical exercise helps, the interesting research question was never whether to combine them but how. Should you do your puzzles and your walk separately, or at the same time? Trials have now compared those arrangements directly, and doing both at once comes out ahead.
Doing cognitive and physical training at the same time was the most effective of the combined approaches for thinking skills, and significantly better than physical exercise on its own.
Network meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials. Any combined training produced a small but significant benefit for overall cognition against control, Hedges g = 0.22, 95% CI 0.14 to 0.30, from 41 comparisons. Within that network, simultaneous training ranked highest for cognition, ahead of sequential training and of cognitive training alone.
Gavelin HM, Dong C, Minkov R, et al. Ageing Research Reviews, 2021.
Adding a cognitive challenge to otherwise identical treadmill training produced a 42% lower fall rate over the following six months.
302 older adults at high risk of falling across five centres, six weeks of training three times a week. Incident rate ratio 0.58, 95% CI 0.36 to 0.96, p = 0.033. Falls fell from 11.9 to 6.0 per six months in the group with the cognitive layer, and from 10.7 to 8.3 in the treadmill-only group, where the change was not statistically significant.
Mirelman A, Rochester L, Maidan I, et al. The Lancet, 2016.
Dual-task exercise significantly improved dynamic balance and functional mobility in older adults, and reduced how often they fell.
44 randomised controlled trials with 2,782 older adults. Balance: mean difference 1.78 on the Berg Balance Scale, 95% CI 0.72 to 2.83. Mobility: mean difference 0.73 seconds on the Timed Up and Go, 95% CI 0.34 to 1.12. The falls result comes from only 6 of the 44 studies, all of which recorded falls by self-report, so it is the least certain of the three.
Khan MJ, Kannan P, Wong TW, et al. European Geriatric Medicine, 2025.
Worth being precise about what that evidence covers. It is strongest for balance and mobility, which are physical outcomes measured with physical tests. It is real but smaller for general thinking skills. It is not evidence that any app prevents disease. The full picture, including where it runs out, is on our science page.
How Stridemind differs from seated brain training.
Apps like Lumosity, Elevate, and BrainHQ are screen-based products you use sitting down. Stridemind is built the other way round. The comparison below is about the two formats rather than about any one product’s quality, which is not ours to judge.
| Seated, screen-based training | Stridemind | |
|---|---|---|
| Where your attention goes | On a screen, in a quiet room, with nothing else competing for it. | On the path in front of you, while a voice gives your mind a separate job. |
| What your body is doing | Sitting still. | Walking, which is the activity most falls happen during. |
| How you respond | Tapping or clicking, so your hands and eyes are occupied. | Thinking the answer. Nothing is tapped, and the phone stays in your pocket. |
| What it is measured against | Scores and streaks inside the app. | A monthly check-in, plus balance and mobility outcomes drawn from the research. |
| Who it is designed for | General audiences, often skewing younger. | Adults 55 and over, in pacing, voice, and session length. |
What Stridemind does not claim.
Having just spent a page on the burden of proof, it would be poor form to skip our own. So, plainly:
- Stridemind is a wellness app, not a medical device, and it does not diagnose, treat, or prevent any condition.
- It makes no claim about dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, or cognitive decline as a diagnosis.
- The research behind the method was conducted on dual-task training programmes in general, not on this app specifically. No trial has tested Stridemind itself.
- The evidence for improved balance and mobility is considerably stronger than the evidence for fewer falls, which rests on a smaller number of studies.
- If you have a diagnosed balance condition or have fallen recently, the right first step is your doctor or a physical therapist, not an app.
Common questions
Do brain training apps actually work?
They reliably make you better at the exercises inside the app. Whether that improvement carries into daily life is the part researchers argue about, and it is called the transfer problem. Practice effects are real learning, but getting quicker at a matching game does not automatically make you sharper in a busy supermarket, because the two situations ask different things of your brain.
Why are brain training apps criticised?
The criticism is about narrow transfer, which means gains tend to stay close to the trained task rather than spreading to everyday ability. It became a consumer-protection matter in 2016, when the US Federal Trade Commission settled with the maker of Lumosity over advertising claims the agency said were not supported by the evidence the company had.
What is a good alternative to seated brain training?
Training that combines thinking with physical movement at the same time has better evidence for general benefit than either one alone. A 2021 network meta-analysis of randomised trials ranked simultaneous cognitive and physical training highest for overall thinking skills, ahead of doing the two separately and ahead of exercise on its own.
Is there screen-free brain training for seniors?
Yes. Any mental task done while walking counts, including counting backwards, naming items in a category, or holding a short list in memory. Stridemind delivers this through audio so nothing needs to be watched, and there are unguided versions you can practise on your own walk without any app at all.
How is Stridemind different from Lumosity, Elevate, or BrainHQ?
Those are seated, screen-based products where you look at a device and respond by tapping. Stridemind is audio-only and designed to be used while you walk, so the thinking happens at the same time as the movement rather than instead of it. It is built for adults 55 and over, and its aim is fall risk and everyday steadiness rather than game scores.
Does Stridemind claim to prevent dementia?
No. Stridemind is a wellness app, not a medical device, and it makes no claim about preventing, treating, or delaying any disease. The research it is built on shows improvements in balance, mobility, and some measures of thinking. That is the claim, and it stops there.
Try it on a walk you were taking anyway.
Stridemind is free to download on iPhone, the first strides are free to train with, and there is no trial that quietly turns into a charge.
Download on the App Store