Study: do hard workouts improve your mental health?

Research has proven that exercise is an effective tool to improve the mental health of individuals suffering from depression or anxiety, but often those studies focussed on light or moderate activity. Less is known about how hard workouts, like intervals, VO2 max sessions or long tempo runs, impact your mental health. Recent research has determined that for healthy young adults, these harder sessions do have some payoff.

State of Mind: Running and Mental Health

The research, which was published in the Jounal of Sports Medicine and Physical Fitness, gathered data from healthy, young subjects and compared their physical activity levels and their levels of cardiorespiratory fitness (using their VO2 max) to their scores from two mental health questionnaires (the Profile of Mood States and the Precieved Stress Scale).

The researchers found that it was the participants’ cardiorespiratory fitness had a greater positive impact on their mental health than their actual level of physical activity. In other words, the participants who were doing harder workouts had better mental health than their counterparts who were doing similar amounts of more moderate workouts.

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What does this mean for runners?

This lead the researchers to conclude the following: “To maximize mental health benefits, exercise training interventions are advised to focus on eliciting improvements in cardiorespiratory fitness.”

Of course, this doesn’t mean that moderate levels of physical activity don’t benefit your mental health, but that by including harder sessions in your weekly regime, you can improve it even more than you would otherwise. So if you’re hesitant at all to start doing speedwork, consider this a nudge to try it out. As the research shows, getting fitter and stronger can improve the health of your mind, too.