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short, high-intensity exercise helps school kids stay active and attentive

four-minute exercise games — funtervals — improve children’s health and behaviour in the classroom.

by canadian society for exercise physiology

apr 11 2022
read time 2 minute read
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short bursts of exercise helps school kids stay active and attentive
by jasmin k. ma, lucy le mare, and brendon j. gurd
with less time being devoted to recess and physical education in schools, children and teachers need good ways to incorporate exercise into the school day. researchers at queen’s university in kingston, ontario, have developed a time-effective, fun, and easy-to-implement exercise program. and there’s evidence that it can improve not only health and fitness, but school performance as well.

funtervals are a series of very brief (four-minute) in-class exercise activities. these activities were adapted from high-intensity interval training and allows participants to achieve health benefits comparable to those gained by performing an hour of traditional endurance training. funtervals involve 20 seconds of activity followed by 10 seconds of rest, repeated for eight intervals. to make these high-intensity activities more appealing to children, actions that involve the child’s whole body — such as squatting, jumping, and running — complement fun, interactive storylines. for example, instead of instructing students to do a squat and press, teachers tell children to reach for an imaginary top shelf to grab a bag of popcorn and placing the bag in a giant bowl on the ground to make popcorn for the entire school.

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the researchers have studied the effects of funtervals on schoolchildren in grades 4 and 5, comparing the children’s behaviour on days when they did funtervals to days when they did not. on days when they did funtervals, the students were less fidgety and less likely to get out of their seats, made more eye contact with the speaker, were more alert and were better able to pay attention.
funtervals have been implemented in countries around the world, including canada, australia, new zealand, china, south africa, india, and the united states.

jasmin ma and brendon j. gurd are with the school of kinesiology and health studies at queen’s university, kingston, ontario, and lucy le mare is with the faculty of education, simon fraser university, burnaby, british columbia. this article summarizes the study ma, j.k., mare, l. le, and gurd, b.j. 2015. four minutes of in-class high-intensity interval activity improves selective attention in 9—11 year olds. applied physiology, nutrition and metabolism 40(3): 238-244. https://doi.org/10.1139/apnm-2014-0309 . this summary was written for the canadian society for exercise physiology and has been reviewed by the csep knowledge translation committee.

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