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A new study out of Great Britain suggests that having strong legs is somehow also related to having a strong brain.

The study was published is the journal Gerontology and was carried out by researchers at King's College London, according to The New York Times.

The researchers looked at 162 pairs of middle-aged female twins. Some of the twins were identical and some were not. The researchers used both fraternal and identical twins in order to better understand if genetic or environmental factors led to some older people with both strong legs and strong minds.

One of the key criteria for the subjects was whether or not they had taken tests of their cognitive abilities and physical health sometime in the last 10 years. The subjects were then asked to complete a new round of cognitive and physical assessments.

The researchers found that people who in the first round of assessments had strong legs also showed less of a decline in their mental abilities during the second round of testing. These findings held true even when researchers controlled for variables like poor diets and high blood pressure.

In pairs of twins where one twin performed much better on the first round of tests, that twin also did much better on the second round. This was true even for identical twins, as revealed by brain scans of 20 pairs of identical twins.

The fact that even identical twins showed differences in cognitive function based on leg strength suggests that environmental factors may be more important than genetic factors in determining how leg strength and mental ability develop.

The study doesn't provide answers for how all of this may be happening, but the lead researcher on the project said that at the very least it provides one more reason to exercise, particularly as one ages.