In 2005, researchers in Washington University St. Louis reported in the Journal of American College Health that upon admission to college, the high stress environment coupled with poor food choices and usually a more sedentary lifestyle led to weight gain. But could this reduction of physical fitness have an impact on things such as the student's GPA and overall academic performance? Moreover, could this decrease in exercise bear consequences for more negative life outcomes?
Entering college removes the average student from 45 minutes of gym class every week day and places him or her in a variable weekday schedule with no daily allocated time for physical activity-unless, of course, he or she chooses to pump iron at the gym at 5pm every day after class. The decrease in exercise for many young adults may even affect their academic performance.
"We've known for some time that participation in regular physical activity has neurological benefits and recently studies have shown that elementary and secondary school students that participate in regular physical activity have lower rates of drug use, sexual activity, criminal behavior, and academic failure; and higher rates of working, doing house work, and getting good grades. We're asking, 'Does exercise work to improve mental performance?' and 'If so, how?'" explained Eduardo Bustamante, a PhD student studying under Dr. David Xavier Marquez in the Department of Kinesiology and Nutrition's Exercise Psychology Lab.
His ongoing study, "Increasing mental performance: The merits of mental versus physical exercise," will attempt to reveal some of the causal influences that physical activity has on aspects of mental performance that he believes may impact academic performance, delinquent behavior, and ultimately life outcomes. Because previous research has been correlational and cannot infer causation, his research design is devised to inspect a facet of the causal mechanism by which physical exercise may affect mental performance. Maybe crunch-time is not just for finals week.
Regarding examining people primed with both physical and mental exercise, the combination of the two may have an additive impact on mental performance. Could there be an interaction effect? "That group could be awesome, but we're concentrating on what is unique about physical and mental exercise independently," clarified Bustamante.
To Dr. David Xavier Marquez, a professor in the Department of Kinesiology and Nutrition, the study would "help fill in some gaps in the literature. We specialize in Exercise Psychology. There has been research showing how exercise produces health benefits. But what about psychological benefits? How does it do that?" The research would provide potential "underlying mechanisms," according to Marquez, that could show how exercise and mental performance are related.
He mentions that too often, we are inclined to criticize and make internal attributions for other people's health outcomes. "We easily say, 'You don't exercise because you're lazy,' or 'He's overweight because he obviously eats too much,'" Marquez elaborated, "We look only at the individual and not at the other determinants of health." In his research, Bustamante is aware that this hypothesized causal mechanism would explain only a small percentage of the variance in mental performance, that there are plenty of social and environmental factors that interact in tandem or asynchronously with physical exercise to produce the outcomes seen in people's cognitive capabilities.
Bustamante explained his reasons for his research study by stating that "right now, there's a crisis of low academic achievement, and high rates of delinquency and incarceration in minority populations. We're trying to take a preliminary step in examining the legitimacy of using physical activity as a vehicle to alter life trajectory in at-risk populations." He continued by saying that physical activity programs, if conducted properly and if explicitly aimed to do so, may "increase the resilience of people in unfavorable situations."
It is not a new headline-maker that students in lower socio-economic classes do not fair as well as their higher socio-economic classed peers. While in part it is due to a lack of resources, it may also be due to a lack of opportunities for engaging in activities that are conducive for optimal growth and development, both cognitively and physically. In 2002, Arizona State University conducted research and found that schools cutting back on Physical Education classes deprived children of arousal and attention that is useful in the classroom, as well as learning spatially and temporally-something that is learned by engaging in physical activity.
Outside of the possibility to gain insight into the relationship with academic performance, the research study's results may hold some predictive value outside of academia because "there's a cultural mythology regarding sports and better life achievement," Bustamante adds. Movies like Glory Road, Coach Carter, and Hard Ball all gravitate towards one central theme: sports teaches lessons about perseverance and teamwork to achieve goals even in the face of extreme social adversity. A character from the film, Coach Carter, says in a scene, "Coach thinks I can play basketball and still get into college." The film depicts that more focused participation in sports lead to success, and consequently more focused participation and success in other areas of life, namely schoolwork. "This study is experimental and uses controlled conditions," said Marquez, "The key would be: Can these relationships be applied to real world settings? What makes people translate discipline from sports into other aspects of life?"
Maybe there is a window of opportunity that physical activity intervention can open to change a person's life in a positive direction. Perhaps, the acquired and developed resiliency throughout life learned from participating in physical activity-whether in team sports or in solitude-could partially account for the positive life outcomes of the characters in those movies. And possibly these traits, together with these outcomes, could be instilled using exercise as a vehicle. These are some of the questions that this research hopes to help answer.
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