The role of exercise in youth mental health

Allan Hallik is a former professional athlete with more than 10 years of experience as a strength and conditioning coach. As a guest writer of this blog post, he discusses the importance of physical activity and its potential effect on children’s mental wellbeing.

Children’s health concerns

It is generally known that children these days have more and more weight issues, they are also getting weaker and have mental health problems. All of these issues make training children challenging, it is increasingly difficult to engage them in exercise. For that reason, it is especially valuable how you are using gamification in the Triumfland Saga health game to encourage kids to get more active. But let’s look further into the importance of mind-body connection and research to support this approach.

I would like to give an overview of a recent review article by Michaela Pascoe and colleagues that aimed to determine if physical activity has any positive effects on the mental wellbeing of adolescents and young adults (aged 12-25). Physical activity of various intensity was reviewed ranging from light to vigorous intensity. Evidence showed that physical activity of varying intensities had positive effect on decreasing symptoms of depression and some evidence showed that in moderate-vigorous intensity and light intensity cases, anxiety symptoms also decreased.

Based on the total reviewed studies (29),  the biggest positive effect on relieving depressive symptoms was while engaging in moderate-vigorous activities when other intensity levels had less effect. Findings on decreasing anxiety symptoms through exercise were similar except for vigorous exercise where 33% saw improvement in decreasing symptoms of depression as opposed to no decrease in symptoms of anxiety. Maybe too intense training would not decrease our anxiety as we have fears related to our performance? Nevertheless, the study also showed that physical activity has a stress-relieving effect and a positive effect on emotional state.

I find it the most important that mental health benefits are associated with lower levels of physical activity than required for physical health benefits!

This effect was seen among adults but it is possible that the same applies to children and adolescents. If so, an active lifestyle would significantly ease the current mental health crisis among children. 

Exercise is a promising early mental health intervention strategy

Taken together, the review found evidence that adding physical activity to our lifestyle might have beneficial effects on mental health promotion. Future research is of course required to back or disprove these findings and fill the gaps in knowledge we already possess but from the practical point of view, I would argue that this approach has a lot of potential in order for us to see improvements in both physical and mental health among children.

It is also recommended that future studies also involve control groups and follow-ups to evaluate the effect size and see if the effects are long-lasting or rather short-term. I also find this to be especially important to evaluate how long these kinds of effects last. From a practical point of view, it gets more and more difficult to motivate children and families to engage in healthy physical activity and I believe that digital tools hold a great promise to make it more appealing and fun for children. Of course, the trainer who is carrying out the training has a huge impact on the trainee as well, which is why we as trainers need to constantly come up with more ways to motivate and engage our students.

To sum up, engaging children in physical activity might be the key to improving their mental state. Having a lot of experience working with kids and teenagers with and without mental health issues, I often see how systematic exercising positively affects their mental health.  But of course, every person is different, and so should be the approach.