If exercise was a living breathing thing, it would have its own talk show for the stellar things it does.
Its importance to physical health has been long established but in recent decades, there has been an ever expanding body of research that has demonstrated the importance of exercise to mental health, particularly in terms of its ability to reduce stress and depression.
Recently, a fascinating study has added to this research demonstrating the importance of exercise to cognitive function.
What They Did
The study was conducted over nine months and involve 221 children from 7-9 years old.
Half the children participated in an exercise program each day after school and the other half were placed on a wait list. All were measured on various cognitive functions and had brain scans before and after the exercise program.
The program involved short bouts of exercise over a two hour period, during which the children wore heart-rate monitors and pedometers.
The active periods totalled about 70 minutes per day.
What They Found
It was no surprise that the children in the exercise group became fitter by the end of the study. Their overall fitness increased by 6%, compared to less than 1% in the children on the wait-list.
Here’s where it gets really interesting. Children in the exercise group showed a substantial increase in attentional inhibition, which is the ability to block out distractions and focus on what they are doing.
Their cognitive flexibility – the ability to switch between tasks without losing speed or accuracy – also improved.
In comparison, children in the wait-list group showed minimal improvement – no more than would be typical of any child over an average nine month period.
‘Kids in the intervention group improved two-fold compared to the wait-list kids in terms of their accuracy on cognitive tasks,’ said Hillman. ‘And we found widespread changes in brain function, which relate to the allocation of attention during cognitive tasks and cognitive processing speed. These changes were significantly greater than those exhibited by the wait-list kids.’
‘Other research … has showed that the cognitive effects of their physical activity intervention are above-and-beyond those that are gained just through social interactions,’ added Hillman.
Given the proven benefits of social interaction for kids, anything that combines physical activity with a social environment, such as participating in a team sport, will be rich in reward for their growing brains as well, of course, as their growing bodies.
![It’s the simple things that are everything. We know play, conversation, micro-connections, predictability, and having a responsive reliable relationship with at least one loving adult, can make the most profound difference in buffering and absorbing the sharp edges of the world. Not all children will get this at home. Many are receiving it from childcare or school. It all matters - so much.
But simple isn’t always easy.
Even for children from safe, loving, homes with engaged, loving parent/s there is so much now that can swallow our kids whole if we let it - the unsafe corners of the internet; screen time that intrudes on play, connection, stillness, sleep, and joy; social media that force feeds unsafe ideas of ‘normal’, and algorithms that hijack the way they see the world.
They don’t need us to be perfect. They just need us to be enough. Enough to balance what they’re getting fed when they aren’t with us. Enough talking to them, playing with them, laughing with them, noticing them, enjoying them, loving and leading them. Not all the time. Just enough of the time.
But first, we might have to actively protect the time when screens, social media, and the internet are out of their reach. Sometimes we’ll need to do this even when they fight hard against it.
We don’t need them to agree with us. We just need to hear their anger or upset when we change what they’ve become used to. ‘I know you don’t want this and I know you’re angry at me for reducing your screen time. And it’s happening. You can be annoyed, and we’re still [putting phones and iPads in the basket from 5pm] (or whatever your new rules are).’♥️](https://www.heysigmund.com/wp-content/plugins/instagram-feed-pro/img/placeholder.png)
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