Effectiveness of Exercises on Mental Health l Assignment

Name:_______________________
Question: How does regular exercise impact on the mental health and academic
performance of secondary school student and why is this the case?
Introduction (100-150 words)
This report states the effectiveness of the regular exercise on mental health of the students.
This research also helps to know about how the academic performance of the student can
change by exercising daily (Teasdale et al. 2017). Secondary school students are suffering
from stress and they needs to overcome their stress and reduce their level of depression. The
student needs to decrease their depression and for that this research study is carried out.
This research will find out how regular exercise can help to increase the mental health of the
student and can improve their performance in academics.
Background Information/Context/Why is this topic important? (200 words)
 Physical activities helps in decreasing the risk of having cardiovascular disease,
cancers, diabetes and many other diseases. But in the recent trend, physical activities
have shown its benefits with mental health and regular activity along with improved
fitness helps in increasing the psychological well-being.
 Students in the secondary level faces stress related with increased academic demands.
Many studies have stated that students having academic stress decreases performance
and motivation and higher rate of withdrawals from courses (Fan and Evans 2017).
There are also long term effects regarding stress in school which includes decreased
likelihood for sustainable employment.
 The activities related to physical exercise reduces the depression risk mostly among
the young people.
Researching about the number of people facing mental disorders in Australia, it was
found that the people suffering from mental disorders mostly were between age group
16 years to 24 years. Physical activities helps to reduce the stress in people and helps
to improve the mood. So, studying the effect of physical activities to improve the
mental stress or disorders due to stress in school students will be helpful to community.
Key Finding 1 (250 – 300
words):___________________________________________________________
 Topic Sentence
Physical exercise improves focus on brains and increases prefrontal cortex,
hippocampus as well as increases temporal lobe in human brains.
 Explanation
The frontal lobe in the brain is vital for consciousness and with functions that appears
in human. For example deals with cognition, problem solving, planning, decision
making, language development and speech production and the prefrontal cortex
specifically helps with planning and order of events as well as short-term or working
memory
Physical exercise and aerobic exercises increases hippocampal perfusion (Carlbring et
al. 2017).
The aerobic training sessions helps to increase the volume of gray matter and the white
matter in prefrontal cortex and helps to increase the functioning key nodes in the
executive control network.
 Example
From the interview taken from Dr. Roy and from Mr. Bradford, it was clear that physical
exercise increases the ability of the human brain and that effects in long term also. As

Name:_______________________
per the interview taken from Mr. Roy, she has stated that from neuroscience studies,
physical exercise has long term effect on the person and helps to improve the attention
function that is increases the prefrontal cortex of the brain (Abdollahi et al. 2017).
This would also result in getting good grades by the students. The activities of physical
exercise is non-stigmatising as well as acceptable approach for promoting the mental
health status in young people.
 Link Back to Question
As per the question, that was asked about what types of behaviour is effected by doing
regular exercise.
Key Finding 2 (250 – 300 words):__________________________________________________________
 Topic Sentence
The second fact that was found was that with the help of exercise, neuroplasticity of
the brain increases and allows new connections to establish.
 Explanation
Physical exercises have many benefits on the brain function that ranges from molecular
level to behavioural level. Physical exercise such as aerobic exercises are mostly
helpful for enhancing the brain functions. Exercise on daily basis helps to increase the
heart rate by increasing more amount of oxygen to brain. This also helps to increase
the bodily release of plethora of hormones.
The growing hormones, and development hormones provide nourishing environment
for growing of the brain cells. Morning exercise helps to stimulate growth factors in
brain which helps to make more neuronal connections in brain (Grassmann et al.
2017). Doing exercise in morning helps to increase the brain activities and prepare the
brain to keep away from mental stress for that day. Exercise helps in producing
increased retention for the new information in brain and also helps in reacting in a
better way in complex situations.
So, it can be said that morning exercise improves the cognitive performance among
students and increases decision making function in them.
 Example
The presenter of the video “The brain changing benefits of exercise” Wendy Suzuki
stated that with regular period of exercise, the activities in the prefrontal cortex,
hippocampus as well as temporal lobe can be increased (San Too, Leach and
Butterworth 2019). The focus of human brains can be increased up to 2 hours by
exercising daily and also helps to decrease the reaction time of the brain. As per Dr.
Wendy, there is a prescription of the exercise for maximizing the brain activity and
helps to optimize learning, memory, and increase attention in the brain.
 Link Back to Question
The question asked about “what type of exercise are mostly beneficial to academic
performance and mental health” is associated with this finding.
Key Finding 3 (250 – 300 words):__________________________________________________________