Our bodies weren’t made to sit for hours in a classroom — or anywhere else. That may be why it’s so hard for many kids to stay focused on their lessons. Research has shown that movement breaks can help students focus better in school. And it doesn’t take much, new data show. Just a few minutes of activity improves brain function and boosts learning.

The findings appear in the July Psychology of Sport & Exercise.

“We always say that exercise gets the wiggles out,” says lead scientist Eric Drollette. It seems kids just need to move when they can’t focus on a task any longer.

An exercise psychologist, Drollette works at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He knew exercise could boost memory and other types of learning. That made him wonder how little exercise was needed.

Previous studies had tested the benefits of 20 to 30 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise. It might be riding a stationary bike or walking on a treadmill. But those regimes can’t be done in a classroom. And they’d take a lot of time away from lessons.

Drollette wanted to develop a program that would take just a few minutes. It would also have to fit into a classroom setting, which often has limited space. Ideally, it would be something kids could do right at their desks.

What his team came up with was a nine-minute high-intensity interval program.

High intensity refers to how quickly someone reaches a target heart rate. Such exercises really get our blood pumping.

Interval refers to the insertion of breaks between bouts of exercise. Kids might exercise for 30 seconds, rest for the next half minute, then do another 30-second bout. High knees, star jumps, jumping jacks, hops, lunges, squats and kicks would all qualify.

Boosting efficiency on some tasks

Drollette and his team recruited 25 students 9 to 12 years old. Each visited his lab three times. There, the kids wore a heart rate monitor and an EEG cap. Sensors in that cap read electrical nerve signals. This records how the brain is responding to specific events.

The kids did a nine-minute activity session on each visit. One time it focused on high-intensity interval exercises. Another time, the kids rode a stationary bike. Watching a short educational video was the third activity. The researchers compared brain responses triggered by each of these different activities.

Shortly after each activity ended, participants completed a test. A computer screen displayed five fish in a line. The test asked kids to note which direction the center fish faced. Sometimes all five fish faced the same direction (left or right). Other times, the center one faced the opposite way than the other four, making it harder to give the right response.

Participants also completed tests of math, word recognition, silent reading and sounding out fake words like “snue” and “blirping.” This last test measured how well students might struggle to pronounce a real word they didn’t yet know.

After high-intensity exercise, students showed a change in one brain response during the fish test. “We call it the uh-oh mechanism,” Drollette says. It happens any time you think, “uh-oh, I made a mistake.” It also has a more formal name: ERN (short for error-related negativity).

The ERN response allows us to recognize a mistake so we can correct it in the future.

High-intensity exercise reduced the size of that response. Kids still realized when they’d erred, but their brains didn’t have to work as hard to pick up on that. The change suggests the exercise had made their brains more efficient.

The other two activities didn’t show that benefit.

Students also performed better after the high-intensity workout on tests that focused on language.

For math, the students performed a bit less well after the high-intensity session than after less-intense exercise or watching the video. That could be due to fatigue, Drollette says. “Physical fatigue will fatigue cognitive abilities as well,” he says. Tasks that require higher-level thinking, such as math, tend to be the first ones affected. The nine-minute session seemed to be just right without overdoing it. 

Added benefit for teens?

“These findings are exciting,” says Lauren Raine. She’s an exercise scientist at Northeastern University in Boston, Mass., who did not take part in the study. “If we provide students with short, high-intensity exercise breaks,” she says, “we may actually see improved academic performance and better processing of mistakes.”

Regular classroom exercise could also improve physical health, she adds.

High-intensity exercise could have added benefits for teens, Drollette suspects. Why? It puts the brain in a mentally healthy state. An overactive ERN is related to anxiety and other mental health issues. High school is “where we see a lot more anxiety among kids,” he says. After finding a change in the ERN in younger kids, he now expects to see the same response in teens.

“Being active can help with a lot of things that are going on in society,” he says. That includes both mental and physical health. So, he recommends, “Find opportunities to stand up and get moving.”