Does exercise really improve your wellbeing?? Let’s find out!

Hey guys! Welcome back to another blog post. I hope your week has been going well. Apologies for the shorter blog post this week, the winter musical Chicago is coming up (yay!), so we’ve been having lots of tech rehearsals. Fortunately I was able to run a little self-experiment this week with the help of my family. I decided to have my family members and I rate our physical and mental wellbeing (on a scale from one to ten) before and after exercising. Additionally, I journaled for ten minutes about my experience throughout the exercise process to take a deeper dive into its affects. This is by no means an air-tight experiment that I will use for any sort of data, but I wanted to explore (for myself) the question of “How will participants (of different ages) rate their physical and mental wellbeing differently both before and after exercising?” Here’s what I found:

Results: -For each participant, the rates of both mental and physical wellbeing increased after exercising, despite age differences

Potential error: Each participant only recorded rates of wellbeing for one instance of exercise, my own rating may have been compromised because I knew the question of the experiment before rating my mental and physical wellbeing, mental and physical wellbeing are subjective…yet are quantified in a way that suggests otherwise

Conclusion: Personally, I can’t really make any broad conclusions off this one self-experimentation, yet it was truly interesting to see how my family all felt better after exercising. Even though we all chose different forms of exercise, both our bodies and our minds seemed improve their wellbeing no matter which form of exercise we participated in! This result goes along with the pub med article linked above, and I am glad to see exercise is not only good for your physical health, but can also help your mind feel better! Super cool! Well, I hope you enjoyed reading my blog for this week, and see you next time!!