With finals coming up, I’ve been procrastinating a lot more than usual. During one of my very long procrastinating nights I came across an article explaining the correlation between working out and getting better grades. Does that mean if I go to the gym everyday this week I’ll be able to pass my finals with flying colors?
After some research, I quickly learned that most likely not. A study at Purdue showed that students who went to the gym more than 16 times a month had a GPA of 3.10 or higher. Although these are positive results that show that working out does help, there are so many third variables that could play into this. First of all, are these students people who have worked out their whole lives? Also, these are the people who were motivated enough to get of their dorms and get themselves to the gym, so they are also more likely to have to the motivation to get their work done. Another thought I had was what kind of workload do these students have? They could be taking only three or four classes, which would give them extra time to study and to work out.
Although there seems to be a correlation between working out and good grades, there is absolutely no proof of causation. This could be due to chance and many other factors. Unfortunately an hour at the gym everyday is not going to get me an A on my finals.
There is no study size given so it is hard to tell, but maybe the people who went to the gym were just smart in general. Do you have gpas of the people who didn’t go to the gym? Its hard to see how effective something may be without a comparison. I feel that working out is definitely relaxing and relieves stress so maybe this allows the students to focus more on work when they leave. We cannot say that going to the gym directly causes higher grades because someone who goes to the gym can be very unintelligent and still get bad grades. Lifting a weight is not going to make them smarter. Although I don’t think going to the gym can hurt, I don’t think there is enough information here to prove that it helps your grades. After looking into it myself, I was able to find another study on the topic which in fact helps to prove your point, check it out.
I loved your post! I wrote a blog on a similar topic last time. Although I wish exercising caused better grades, I do not think that this study proves it. It seems to be an observational study which means that third variables are not ruled out like you mentioned. In addition to that, the correlation found could be due to reverse causation. It is possible that students with better grades are more likely to go to the gym. I think that more studies should be done to get more accurate results. I think it is possible that exercise could cause students to have better grades. A study posted in WebMD showed that a high school required students to have PE class in the morning before other classes and students math scores improved 20%. This shows a matching correlation, but there still might have errors in that study. http://fit.webmd.com/teen/move/article/exercise-boosts-brain?page=2