Can Jogging Improve Your Grades?

Some recently disclosed results from Dr. William J. McCarthy and his colleagues at UCLA suggest that the general fitness state of a student is directly related to its academic results. Does it mean that we finally have a good excuse to stop spending countless hours sweating on our notes before an exam and go for a nice walk in the park instead?

McCarthy put the surveyed students on the track for a one mile run/walk fitness test and compared their results with the marks they obtained in math, reading and language. The sample comprised 2703 students from public elementary, middle and high schools. Among the subjects, 16 percent were overweight and 13 percent obese, which crushed with my belief that in California everyone was blonde, fit and on rollerskates (or a bodybuilder).

The results showed that about two thirds of the total were below the fitness standards (some of them took more than 15 minutes to complete the lap!) for their age and gender, and probably not blonde either. It turned out that the best scorers were also the best runners; a revenge of the gym buddy over the unfit geek, and what a revenge! The standardised reading test score dropped of about one point for every extra minute on the one mile run.

These results indeed suggest a correlation between fitness state and intellectual performance. Nothing new, if we think of the ancient roman poet Juvenal, who suggested more than a millennium ago that we should aim for a healthy mind in a healthy body (mens sana in corpore sano).

It is unclear though, what makes the healthier individuals score higher than their unfit colleagues. In the work of McCarthy there is no reference to the amount of time each student spent revising for the tests, nor is clear if the better results depended on an improvement of memory, focus or else induced by the healthier lifestyle. There is still a lot to research, before we can fully understand the connections between mind and body.

Something is certain anyway, that no result comes without effort. Without long hours of study, even the fastest runner on earth will not know anything about history or algebra.

Source: https://101sarms.com/