CHAPTER 10

Exercise: Student Bodies in Motion

The body is the storm-center, the origin of coordinates.… The world is experienced at all times with our body as its center, center of vision, center of action, center of interest.

—William James

Gym class wasn’t always just about dressing up in unflattering clothing and running around in circles. Back in the day, there was an essential belief that in life we would need both an academic and a physical education, and pursuing one without the other would be like learning addition without subtraction. In 1861, Amherst College created what is considered the first undergraduate PE program, and to administer this program the school did not turn to their greatest athlete, they hired a Harvard physician known affectionately as Doc. Physical education at the time sprang from the belief that the “highest intellectual efficiency can never be reached, the noblest characters will never be formed, till a greater soundness of physical constitution is attained.” PE wasn’t to “develop sportsmen,” but rather to help students “relieve the strain associated with their academic courses.” We don’t know about you, but that was definitely not our gym class.

Your skepticism about the state of science back in 1861 is warranted. After all, we are talking about the year the Civil War began, when a person’s character was still assessed by the bumps on their head, and fevers were treated by bleeding the patient. Although we are glad bloodletting and head-feeling have tapered off, in this chapter we will see that Amherst’s initiative was more prescient than they could have imagined. Separating our body and mind means running the risk of limiting our potential and experience in life. Movement and a healthy body (whatever that looks like for you) are elemental in the pursuit of well-being, and essential for you to thrive in the classroom.

Changing your level of physical activity is notoriously challenging. You most likely will not put down this chapter and sprint to the gym, and it’s not the Tone It Up girls we’re trying to channel here. We draw our inspiration instead from the immortal wisdom of the Beastie Boys, “We need body rockin’, not perfection.” We will show you how to develop the physical activity that is right for you and how that activity will power your mood, concentration, and ability to learn.

Motion Throughout the Millennia

For tens of thousands of years, our ancestors averaged five to ten miles, on their feet, each day to find food. They foraged for nuts, berries, anything they could eat, all the while making sure that nothing ate them. Movement was inextricably intertwined with human evolution… not to mention sheer survival. In college, it will help you thrive.

Our bodies are primed from the beginning of our lives to enjoy physical activity. When we are active, we release all the hormones and neurotransmitters (dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin, endorphins, you-name-itins) that make us feel good. It’s like a buffet of positive emotions. Exercise, sports, and games focus and absorb you, getting you into flow. Also, if you have been having a bad day, physical activity can act as an amazing distraction from whatever was spinning in your mind moments before.

If you haven’t thrown down this book to go rock climbing, that’s not surprising. Your behavior is consistent with the frequency of physical activity going on in the United States today: not a lot. Our hunter-gatherer past is long gone, and today all you have to hunt for is your cell phone. A few clicks and your kill (be it pizza, wings, Vietnamese, Chinese, Italian, or Thai) will arrive at the door, plastic utensils included. The world of food is truly at your fingertips. Modern conveniences have slammed the brakes on our movement. Though spending all day sitting is not in accordance with thousands of years of evolution, fewer of us earn a living with physical labor, and the college environment (not to mention the deskbound jobs that follow) encourages us to plant our bodies in a seat, whether during class, at the library, or in the dorm.

Bodies and Brains

You may or may not think of yourself as a physically active person, but we can say with close to 99 percent certainty that as a toddler and as a child, you were moving around constantly. There is a reason you don’t see two-year-olds chilling slack-jawed on the couch (and why you do see exhausted new parents): thousands of years of evolution. The benefits of moving are innately understood by children: it makes them feel good, it is how they learn, and although they have no awareness of this, it is helping their brains develop. These benefits don’t stop when we hit puberty, when we get to college, or when we start collecting Social Security. They are with us our entire lives, but only if we take advantage of them.

Jump Around, Jump Around, Jump Up, Jump Up, and Get… Big Brains

With movement come bigger brains, and bigger brains can come with many benefits, one of them being “magna cum laude” embossed on your diploma. Like our Civil War–era Doc, Harvard University’s John Ratey is on his own mission to illustrate the power of increasing your heart rate. In his book Spark, Ratey tells the story of Naperville Central High School on the outskirts of Chicago. Like most schools, Naperville was searching for ways to raise its national test scores by improving the minds of its students. Often people think higher test scores come from effective teaching or diligent study habits, but Naperville decided to get the gym teachers involved, implementing a program to increase physical fitness in order to improve mental aptitude.

Naperville Central High dramatically altered its exercise program, grading students not just on their athletic prowess (or simply on attendance), but on how long they could keep their heart rate in an elevated zone. The school equipped every student with a heart monitor to wear during gym class, and provided more activities from which students could choose. Sports were made more aerobically challenging by making teams smaller to encourage more movement. If sports weren’t your thing, walking was just fine. Even Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) was an option. Physical activity didn’t stop after gym class—DDR and treadmills were available before and after school and even before particularly demanding classes. If you’re wondering why any of this mattered, here’s your answer: Naperville students are among the 230,000 students around the world who take the TIMSS (a test that ranks nations in terms of math and science). Before the phys ed initiative, Naperville’s scores were on par with the United States average: eighteenth in math and nineteenth in science worldwide. After the new athletic program was implemented, Naperville’s rankings went through the roof: sixth in math and first in science in the world.

It’s not that every student had to run the mile in under four minutes to stimulate their brains; it’s that they kept moving. When we exercise, a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF, or what Ratey refers to as Miracle-Gro for the brain) is synthesized, causing our frontal lobes to get pumped up like the bulging biceps of a professional body builder. Frontal lobes are where you find your willpower, your ability to focus, learn, and even ponder the nature of life. BDNF gets its biggest bump from aerobic exercise—the kind of activity that requires a lot of oxygen to keep you powered, including jogging, riding a bike, swimming, and most importantly, walking—and as the students at Naperville showed, that can add up to a cornucopia of benefits.

There is growing evidence that exercise does more than just grow your brain. Done at the right time, exercise improves your memory. In a recent study on undergrads in the Netherlands, seventy-two students were asked to memorize ninety pictures over a period of approximately forty minutes. Participants were randomly assigned to three groups. One group was given a thirty-five-minute workout session immediately after being shown the pictures. Another group (the control group) watched nature documentaries for three hours between seeing the photos and their workout session. And the final group was asked to hang out for four hours before being given their own thirty-five-minute workout. Two days later, the three groups were tested on their recall of the ninety pictures. The folks who worked out after the four-hour delay remembered 10 percent more of the material than their counterparts. Improving our recall is not just about adding more Miracle-Gro to the brain; it’s knowing when to add it.

Movement for the Masses

Emil, a student who commuted to our class from outside NYC, approached us at the end of the semester to share his experience with physical activity: “I am not an athlete,” he said. “Can’t throw a ball, always hated gym. But I like to walk, and since we covered exercise in class, instead of taking the subway from Grand Central, I walk the two miles here and back. I lose some time but feel great and am more alert in class when I get there.” Many of our students tell us they don’t feel like athletes, but we all have the ability to be active. Walking or sprinting, dancing or playing ball, growing your brain isn’t about getting fit for the Olympics, it’s about finding the exercise that fits you.

Plenty of people don’t feel naturally inclined toward physical activity, or at least don’t consider themselves athletic, and we are giving you license to blame it on your elementary school gym class. Unfortunately, PE can be a difficult environment: everyone wants to win, and your physical appearance (or performance) may relegate you to getting picked last for everything, every time. The more frequently this occurs, the more likely it is that the last-picked kid will develop an aversion to physical activity. These kids begin to “self-handicap”: when a student does not feel good about their ability on the court, they are more prone to find a way to get off it. These experiences can add up to a profound impact on their self-esteem, often leaving them with a mindset that physical activity should be avoided.

We aren’t gym teachers, but we would like to personally apologize to everyone who had bad experiences growing up in PE, because it did you a great disservice. Not only that, we are going to do something about it. Yes, we are offering a makeup class that’s all about you! The best part? This new opportunity gives you the power and ability to shape your own relationship with physical activity and how it can make you look, feel, and engage with your body.

Getting going may be as simple as changing the way you think about being active. Just as you have mindsets regarding stress, and can change those mindsets, you have mindsets about the body and what it means to exercise. Researchers Ellen Langer and Alia Crum had hotel maids reframe the way they think about the walking, bending, and cleaning they do every day. They pointed out to the cleaning staff that throughout the day, they were also accomplishing a considerable amount of physical exercise: every fifteen minutes spent changing linens burned forty calories, vacuuming for fifteen minutes another fifty, and cleaning a bathroom knocked off sixty. Cleaning fifteen rooms in a given day, the 2,250 calories they were burning easily exceeded the surgeon general’s recommendations for being active. Four weeks after elevating their awareness regarding physical activity, the housekeepers were found to have decreased weight, body fat, and blood pressure. The control group, which was similar to the subjects in every way (age, weight, activity) but did not receive this intervention, showed no changes in health.

How does this magic happen? There was no increase in reported exercise outside work, nor any increase in workload, and yet the subjects were getting a different, healthier result, simply because they had changed their mindset regarding exercise. It may be the power of the placebo effect. As Crum points out, people who are exposed to fake poison ivy will develop rashes; given fake caffeine, they become more alert; and if given fake knee operations, they will report reduced pain and swelling in their “healed” tendons and ligaments. Just changing your mindset about how you are currently being physically active may give your body a much-needed boost.

Take Control of Your Engine

When life feels out of control, students have been shown to be more negative about the future and their ability to thrive in it. Incorporating physical activity into our life, no matter what else has gone haywire, can boost our confidence in the knowledge that we still have control over our decisions and our body.

In a study of over seven thousand undergrads across Europe, students who felt they had some control over their health were 40 percent more likely to exercise. But cause and effect can also be flipped: one of the benefits of exercise is the feeling that you are in control of something (namely, your body). The correlation between movement and a sense of control is powerful enough for therapists treating post-traumatic stress disorder to use surfing lessons and strength training as a way to help patients overcome the feeling that life is no longer in their hands. Feeling physically healthier and more attractive, more comfortable in your movements, and more poised (and sleeping better, to boot) leaves you feeling more in control over who you are.

The Student Body Is Not Going Anywhere

Undergrads shuffle an average of 7,700 steps per day. The recommended guideline is 10,000, meaning that most of you are getting—yikes—a C+. Whether it is in front of the television or computer or in a car, there is a whole lot of sitting going on. Even if you are doing everything right and following the national guidelines to exercise daily for thirty minutes, spending the rest of the day stuck in park puts you at higher risk for everything from weight gain, to diabetes, to heart disease. Regular motion is key when it comes to maximizing your physical and mental health.

Being your best in college should be a very moving experience. When you feel the urge to stay seated in the library, glued to your computer, or hunched over a microscope, think again. There’s a reason President Obama took a break to shoot hoops and big-brained luminaries ranging from Aristotle to Charles Dickens were famous for their long walks (Dickens would walk twenty miles to his country house): movement enhances mental performance. When we stop moving for too long, we do not end up in neutral—we take two steps backward. A student body in motion can help you (and your beautiful brain) stride onward and upward, helping you thrive from your first step on campus through your walk to accept your diploma.

Opportunities for Action

Exercise: Putting the Movement Back into Your Life

Take a second to think: Is physical activity built into your daily routine?

It takes just five minutes: Quick energy breaks can make a huge difference during a long day of immobility. Many of us, exhausted by work, want to “do nothing” when we take a break, but in a study out of the University of Sheffield in England, psychologists Maxine Campion and Liat Levita compared undergrads who were asked to dance or do nothing. Those who got down for just five minutes increased their positive emotions and decreased the negative ones, leaving them more energized and more creative than their “do nothing” counterparts. When you sit down to get work done, it’s easy to forget about taking a break or to feel it’s a waste of time. But the payoff from doing ten pushups or taking a walk around the library comes in higher productivity. Don’t let movement be an afterthought—instead, schedule it into your routine.

Standing rules: Although they are in their infancy, standing desks are gaining popularity fast. It’s not hard to design a custom one for your room, and they are available relatively cheaply from IKEA. Studies show that people who move between standing and sitting are more productive than those who remain motionless. Many actors in our class tell us that when they want to learn lines, they head straight for the treadmill, elliptical, or stationary bike.

Exercise: Finding the Flow in Your Workout

A recent survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 65 percent of adolescents, 40 percent of college students, and 15 percent of adults exercised regularly. Many of us stop engaging in exercise because we have too much work and it’s not convenient, and for some, it’s just not fun. But being physically active not only makes us feel healthy and can potentially fill us with positive emotion, it has also been identified as a driver for engagement (remember that “optimal experience” from Chapter 3). Whether it’s racquetball or Zumba, here are some ways to stay engaged with your exercise:

Set some goals: By setting goals, you are setting yourself up for accomplishments (the A in PERMA). Doing so will also help you avoid the dreaded workout burnout. If you are going to the gym but find that boredom sets in, you may not be challenging yourself sufficiently or varying the activity enough. Try asking these three simple questions to get you into the zone:

1. What am I going to accomplish (how far/long/intensely am I going to push myself?) at the gym/track/workout?

2. What am I going to do differently during this activity that I have never attempted before?

3. Did the challenge meet or slightly exceed my skill level (a sign of a good activity)?

Just as you wouldn’t take the same class over and over again in college, try new activities when you exercise, keep things varied, and you will stay engaged with your body.

Make it social: If it’s hard for you to make it to the gym, bringing a friend along may give you a boost and make it more fun. Working out can be intimidating, and the social support may allow you to get over your anticipatory anxiety and help the time pass more quickly and more enjoyably.

Exercise: Putting Your Mind Back into Your Body

For a moment, consider the hotel maids—what activities in your life might you already be performing that you can consider physical activity? Make a list. Whether you volunteer at a soup kitchen, return books to the shelves at a library, or work in a restaurant, you probably have a lot of movement in your life. Just considering how physical activity is already a part of your life may have its own health benefits. Break down the activities in your life with these questions:

1. How can I use technology to optimize my daily exercise routine? Every cell phone has the capacity to track the number of steps you are taking (and probably already is without your even knowing it). What number are you hitting regularly, and what goals would indicate progress and success?

2. Where can I incorporate physical activity into my life?

a. Walking instead of riding?

b. Riding (a bike) instead of driving?

c. Stairs instead of elevator?

3. Where can I eliminate some sitting (or other sedentary behavior) in my life?

The Takeaway

The Big Idea

The optimal mind and sense of well-being cannot be achieved without physical activity.

Be Sure to Remember

Physical activity leads to bigger brains and better moods; we don’t need to run the marathon to find its benefits.

Regular physical activity (at least once per hour) enhances our mood and cognitive capacity.

Feeling that we have control over something in life is essential for our well-being. Daily physical activity confirms that, no matter what happens, we will maintain control over something: our body.

Making It Happen

One of the best ways to stay physically active is to incorporate it into your day-to-day activities. Take the stairs, walk to work, find a volunteer activity that keeps you moving, or get a standing desk.

If you want to maintain exercise in your life, make it self-reinforcing: make it enjoyable. Set goals for yourself, challenge yourself, and even better, bring a friend. Whatever you do, don’t let it get boring—you will end up with workout burnout.

If you were scarred by a traumatic gym class, consider shifting your mindset about exercise. Physical activity can be found in many forms—find the one that fits you best. Just do it.