In 2014, pediatric occupational therapist Angela Hanscom set out to better understand the student experience by sitting in on middle school classes. She sat. She sat some more. She then noticed that a day’s worth of sitting was affecting her ability to focus. She asked “how on Earth do these children tolerate sitting this long?” before spotting all the fidgety, distracted bodies – “well, the short answer is they don’t.”
Schools have become sedentary. This concern is rooted in the commonly ignored factor that students are embodied. Those delicate brains we hope to educate are carried around in living, breathing vessels. Those bodies are built to move, but our young people are simply… not. Not enough, at least.
Hanscom’s experience is not unique. Fewer than 1 in 5 students are getting the recommended amount of exercise.
Mark Mattson, adjunct professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University, asserts that this sort of lifestyle “betrays the evolutionary history encoded in our genes” (Mattson, p.347). The counter-evolutionary construct of sedentary school days has the potential to make students bored, unfocused and unhealthy, while contributing to a variety of student psychological disorders, including anxiety.
But if we use these bodies in the manner in which they were built, studies have shown that exercise can improve memory, attention, and executive control.
This shouldn’t be surprising. Lisa Feldman Barret, Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University, reminds us that “the brain did not evolve for us to think and feel and see – it evolved to control your body, and everything else we do, we do in service to the body.”
Too often, we seem to forget that evident truth. But this is a new phenomenon.
How Did We Get Here?
Before Boston Latin school was founded in 1635, a young person’s ability to sit down and be quiet had never been rewarded. Back then, Americans were in the process of setting a new behavioral standard. Those who master these environments (sitting for an average of nearly 7 hours per day) were rewarded and moved successfully through the educational system.
Then they built the systems of the world in their image. One might move from a sedentary school to a sedentary workplace. Though it may not seem like a big deal on the surface, the deskbound will find themselves at a greater risk of obesity, diabetes, heart attack and stroke. Truly, we are dealing with a public health dilemma. The CDC recognizes a U.S. population wherein more than 100 million of us have diabetes or prediabetes.
One of the CDC recommendations to prevent that disease is to exercise.
Businesses are taking up the cause. The Google workplace, for example, is an open environment which encourages employees to move around during the day; Google also offers on-site training centers and hundreds of fitness class options.
While Google may or may not have public health on its ming, the company was eager to use exercise for its potential to improve concentration, cognition, and executive control. Within educational systems, adoption and successful implementation of movement-based initiatives has been slower.
Some schools have made valiant attempts to incorporate exercise-based strategies, but the work has just begun.
Whether we hope to educate well in the moment or prevent disease down the line, exercise should be taught and healthy lifestyles should be nurtured. Students have to move.
One Piece of the Puzzle
Once we acknowledge the student as an embodied human being, we must take steps to account for that in the development of systems and structures wherein students spent the bulk of their time.
Although it is essential, exercise alone will not set our students up for success.
The research on exercise should be understood as one component of what can be referred to as the Physiological Bedrock of human performance. A successful student is one who eats, moves, and sleeps well – all other capacities of mind will be enhance or degraded by their physiological state.
The easiest way to grasp the importance of this physiological bedrock is to imagine it being significantly incomplete: if one is sedentary, malnourished, and sleep-deprived, how well could we expect them to perform?
The student who is physically unwell, trying not to get caught dozing at her desk during math class, would find it difficult to fully understand advanced trigonometry. In such a case, the message of the most expert teacher would still fall on deaf ears.
With the physiological state of the student in mind, teachers must recognize that exercise is essential to the educational environment and develop creative ways to incorporate movement within the school day. But they must also decide what to do with vending machines filled with gummy worms and Doritos, and school start times which ensure sleep deprivation.
Ideally, education at large will reframe the way it perceives physical and mental wellness. Physical Education and Health cannot be secondary subjects – they are central to the abilities, relationships, and learning outcomes of our students.
Simultaneously, Physical Education and Health teachers should confront the fact that the reputation of their field has come from a real place. If P.E. teachers do not take their classes seriously, coasting through the day until their after school sports begin, then the field will continue to be challenged.
Once an institution reframes its mindset around Health, Wellness, and P.E., it should take steps to ensure that movement is a standard component of each and every school day.
A wellness initiative is only as good as the cultural soil in which it is planted.
Heading in the Right Direction
Many teachers are attempting to create active classroom environments. Others are studying exercise as a deliberate intervention to enhance psychological variables. The opportunities, should exercise and wellness become a greater priority, are endless.
Once we prioritize physiological wellness, we should empower students with strategies for self-awareness and healthy habits so that they can continue these behaviors on their own. This should occur alongside efforts to create an institutional culture that prioritizes health and wellness as the core of performance.
Like most good things, this process will take some time. There will be bumps in the road, but the journey toward wellness will be worth it.
If we can share the habits of health and wellness, Educators, then we are truly teaching lessons for a lifetime.
For more, check out the HIGH ORDER PERFORMANCE framework, and feel free to REACH OUT.
References & Further Reading
Mattson, Mark P., (2012). Evolutionary Aspects of Human Exercise – Born to Run Purposefully. Ageing Research Review, 11(3), 347-352.
Good Athlete Podcast, Episode 42 with Lisa Feldman Barrett: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/good-athlete-podcast/e/55955668
How Exercise Effects Your Brain; Scientific American: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-exercise-affects-your-brain/
Regular Exercise Changes the Brain to Improve Memory, Thinking; Harvard Medical School: https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/regular-exercise-changes-brain-improve-memory-thinking-skills-201404097110
Organic Fitness: Physical Activity Consistent with our Hunter-Gatherer Heritage; The Physician and Sports Medicine: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3810/psm.2010.12.1820
Prevalence of US Youth (12-17 Years) Meeting Recommended Levels of Moderate to Vigorous Physical Activity: NHANES; American Heart Association: https://healthmetrics.heart.org/prevalence-of-us-youth-12-17-years-meeting-recommended-levels-of-moderate-to-vigorous-physical-activity-nhanes/
Good Athlete Podcast, Episode 87 with John Ratey: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/good-athlete-project/good-athlete-podcast/e/66562976
Lack of exercise is a major cause of chronic diseases; Comprehensive Physiology: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/242018403_Lack_of_Exercise_Is_a_Major_Cause_of_Chronic_Diseases
A Sleep-Deprived Nation; Harvard Graduate School of Education: https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/uk/19/01/sleep-deprived-nation
School Vending Machines “Dispensing Junk”; Center for Science in the Public Interest: https://cspinet.org/new/200405111.html
