Our co-founder Danny Fung recently joined wellbeing coach and good friend Darlene Marshall on her NASM Better Than Fine podcast to discuss fascinating new research linking exercise and emotional well-being. Both Danny and Darlene are graduates of the Master of Applied Positive Psychology (MAPP) program at the University of Pennsylvania. In the podcast, they discussed the research paper “Exercise prescriptions for young people’s emotional well-being” by Huang and Wong, and offered some compelling insights that every coach and youth sports educator should know about.
You can watch the full episode here.
The Research Paper
The systematic review analyzed nearly 1,000 studies before narrowing down to 20 high-quality pieces of research focusing on how exercise intensity, duration, and type of activity affect emotional well-being in young people aged 13-28. What they found challenges some common assumptions about “more is better” when it comes to physical activity.
Exercise & Emotional Wellbeing: 4 key insights
1. Moderate Beats Extreme The research clearly shows that low to moderate intensity exercise is most effective for improving young people’s emotional well-being. Controversially, high-intensity training may actually increase depression, anger, and fatigue in young athletes. This doesn’t mean high-intensity work is always bad, activities like boxing and tennis showed positive results, likely due to their social and enjoyment factors – but it does mean we need to be more thoughtful about when and how we push intensity.
2. Less Can Be More Here’s a game-changer: even short-duration (10-20 min) exercise is effective in reducing psychological distress and boosting positive wellbeing. This supports the concept of “exercise snacks” – short bursts of activity that can be more effective than longer sessions. For coaches, this means those brief, focused training segments might be doing more good than we realize.
3. Choice and Autonomy Matter While the study looked at various activities (stair climbing, nature walks, and Tai Chi showed particularly strong results), what stood out in our discussion was the importance of autonomy. Young people benefit significantly more when they have choice in their exercise activities. This is a crucial difference between youth and adult exercise, where adults typically choose their activities and young people are often told what to do.
4. The Social Factor Changes Everything As mentioned, some high-intensity activities like tennis and boxing showed positive results, most likely due to their social component. When young people engage in activities with friends or partners, the relationship benefits (the ‘R’’ in PERMA) can outweigh the stress of high intensity.
What This Means for Coaches
At PSE, we emphasize that sports should build character and well-being, not just physical fitness. These findings validate we’ve been teaching coaches through our PSE framework:
- Meet athletes where they are rather than imposing rigid intensity requirements
- Offer choices within your training sessions – let athletes have some say in their activities
- Focus on building lifelong exercise habits rather than short-term performance gains
- Remember that social connection matters – activities with partners or team elements often show better outcomes
Leave a Reply