Exercise is good for you body and mind – you know this already. You need a good balance between physical, mental and social activity in your life to feel happy. But did you know that physical exercise could help you academically?
Scientists at the University of Sydney found that exercising during school hours brought improvements to students’ academic performance.
Exercising can be a lot of fun, especially for school children. Also, it improves academic performance. Image credit: Tdorante10 via Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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Schools usually include some sort of physical education. Many students disregard these classes as not important, unless they see their future in some kind of an athletic setting. Others believe that spending more attention in more mind-driven classes is more important. However, a new paper combining results of 115 studies conducted worldwide (majority in the United States) involving more than one million students found that exercising is good for your academic performance.
Well, alright – this study found a small improvement in academic performance from sport participation. However, that improvement was greater when exercising was done during school hours (think about physical education classes). Researchers found that exercising was particularly beneficial for mathematics and science grades, less so for language performance. Interestingly, it appears that there might be too much sport sometimes – sport participation was the most effective in terms of academic performance when 1-2 hours of exercise was performed per week. More or less didn’t bring the same benefits.
But why sports would improve academic performance? Well, this study didn’t look into the reasons. However, physical exercise improves blood flow and generally get the body going. Brain is part of the body. Furthermore, sports offer a small ability to rest your cognitive capacity, helps remove toxins and strengthen the immune system. All of these benefits are good for the body and mind.
Authors of the study commented their results: “It appears that sport participation within the school environment and of a moderate dose could improve school-age children’s academic performance, particularly in mathematics and science.” They believe that higher quality studies are needed to define future policies and school schedules. Maybe physical education classes should be given a higher priority.
In fact, physical education classes definitely should be regarded as more important than they are. They help introduce exercise to children. They are also quite a lot of fun and can help fighting the growing problem of overweight and obese children.
Source: University of Sydney