Brain researchers suggest sports breaks every hour at school

"No adult would work under the conditions that apply to students in school today," says neuroscientist Charles Hillman.

The expectation of children attending school is that they will remain silent, concentrated and focused for long periods. It is unrealistic to believe that they should be able to learn or perform optimally in such conditions, says Charles Hillman at Northeastern University in Boston, USA.

"We adults never do that when we work," he says. We get up, get coffee, take small breaks when surfing the net or talk to a colleague, ”he says. Yet, the school is still laid out through long lessons in academic subjects stacked on top of one another. In addition, the breaks are now rarely used for physical activity, he says.

For more than 20 years he has studied how physical activity affects the memory and learning ability of children. In several studies, he and his research team have shown how much more efficient the brain works if you break off concentration with periods of movement. Even a single training session temporarily improves learning ability.

Even better is getting into physical activity as a habit. Exercise affects several parts of the brain and makes the connections faster. In particular, the hippocampus, which is the part associated with memory and learning, is improved.

- If I had to choose how a school day would be arranged, it would start with 45 minutes of academic work such as counting or writing, then it would be a ten-minute break with high-intensity physical training of some kind and then they would have five minutes to do themselves ready for the next lesson, he says.

Charles Hillman sits in an expert group that designed health advice for American schoolchildren and their recommendation is at least 60 minutes of physical activity a day.

Very few American or Swedish children move so much. Among 15-year-old girls in Sweden, there is as little as nine percent and although 11-year-old boys, with their 23 percent do slightly better, most are just too sedentary.

This will be a public health problem if the adults do nothing about it, Hillman says. More research is needed on how much , how intensely and when children should exercise, to give the best effect on learning and feeling, so that the school can be better adapted to it.

You can see more about exercise and how it affects the health and the brain in the SVT program Best training.