Children engaged in an after-school activity show improvements in cognitive functions, as a new study from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign reports.
The research involved a randomized controlled trial including 7 to 9 years-old children and randomly assigned them to either an after-school program called FitKids, or to a wait list control group.
Prior to and after the intervention, the children went through different cognitive testing and brain imaging.
The researchers found that the children involved in the physical activity program demonstrated greater change in brain function and improvement on certain cognitive functions.
Following a physical activity, children showed increasing performances associated with their ability to pay attention to a task, avoid distraction and multitask.
“The relationship between physical activity and performance on these tasks, and changes in brain function, was related to the amount of time that they spend in the program, so that kids who attended the program more frequently had greater change in brain function and better performance on the task at post tests,” said Charles Hillman, lead author of the study.
Hillman is a kinesiology and community professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and explained that the FitKids intervention was based on the CATCH curriculum, a National Institutes of Health sponsored physical activity program that previously has been shown to have physical benefits to children.
Hillman said the FitKids program was designed so children would be engaged in a moderate-to-vigorous level of exercise for more than 60 minutes per day.
“The goal was to make it fun and design it in a way that kids normally like to be physically active, meaning that they are more intermittent in their physical activities rather than sustained physical activity behaviors. And it was non-competitive in nature,” Hillman said.
He explained that the activities in which children were engaged, such as dribbling a ball around obstacle courses, changed from one type of exercise to another.
In light of these findings, Hillman said it is clear that time spent being physically active is important not only for physical health but also brain health.
“There are organizations out there, such as the Institute of Medicine, who recommend that kids receives 60 minutes or more of physical activity every day at a moderate-to-vigorous intensity, and that schools should be responsible for at least 30 of those 60 minutes,” Hillman said.
Hillman said his follow up research looks at other aspects of brain function and structure to get a better understanding of the specific relationship between physical activity and brain growth and development.