Video Transcription

Why Playing Sport Gets You Better Grades

Why playing sport will help you get better grades. Now, this might seem like an outrageous statement, but I want to, in this video, take some time to explore why this is a common myth and actually bust this myth.

One of the things that I found is that most students believe that to get top marks, you need to quit all your extracurricular activities, including sport, and maybe work to excel at school. So I want to look at why this is actually incorrect, and you’re probably sitting there watching this video thinking, “This guy is a little bit crazy.”

So I’m going to prove to you today why playing sport will help you improve your grades at school. Now, I want to kick things off, I guess, by sharing my own personal story. I managed to successfully play soccer competitively during Year 12. Now, what this meant was that I trained two to three afternoons a week, I played all day Saturday, and often I had Sunday sessions as well. Despite quite a heavy training load, I still managed to excel academically at school.

Now, I don’t say this to boast; I’m certainly not the exception. What I found from spending the last seven years researching with Australia’s top students is that many other top-performing students would regularly play sport and exercise. In fact, what they did very effectively was balance sport and exercise with their study. It was that balance that enabled them to excel at school and get top grades in their final exams.

So there’s a great case study I want to share with you of a student who, you know, was the top-performing student. He got a 99.95, which meant that he placed in the top 49 out of 67,000 students across New South Wales. What’s interesting though, is that he subscribed to that common myth. He quit all his extracurricular activities—his sport and all exercise—believing that would help him get better grades.

He felt that if he got rid of all this stuff, he’d have more time to study, and that more time to study would lead to him improving his scores and achieving his academic goals. Now, interestingly, the results were not what he thought. After quitting all of his sport and exercise for about six months, what he found was that his marks were quite average. They hadn’t actually improved to the level that he was aiming for.

Additionally, he became incredibly stressed out, and in fact, the stress levels became so much that he actually became depressed and had to go and see a psychologist. Funnily enough, the advice the psychologist gave him was to actually play sport again, to exercise, and to do some of those extracurricular activities that he’d quit in the belief that it would help him improve his grades.

Now, basically, what he found was that sport and exercise were vital for academic success, and this is something that I discovered from talking and interviewing and researching with top-performing students. There are three key reasons as to why exercising and sport—and balancing that with your study—is key to improving your grades during Year 12. The first reason is something called Parkinson’s law, the second is endorphins, and the third is the idea that sport and exercising are fun.

But we’re going to break these all up a little bit and look at each one of them in a little bit of detail, to look at exactly why each of these contribute to making sport and exercise an effective way to stay not stressed and also improve your grades during the year.

So, what is Parkinson’s law? Parkinson’s law essentially states that work expands to fill available time. I’m going to repeat that because it’s so important: work expands to fill available time.

Now, essentially what this means is that if you give yourself two hours to complete a task, it will take you those full two hours. Now, I think you, you know, perhaps the best way to look at this is to give an example. If you have no sport, no exercise, or no extracurricular activities on an afternoon after school, the reality is you have the whole afternoon and the whole night to study.

Now, what I’ve typically found happens is that a student sits down, they come home from school, they grab some food, and then they realize, “Well, look, I’ve got all night to study. I can surf the net, I can watch TV, I’ll do some of that now, and then I’ll study later.” Eventually, they begin studying, but at the end of the day, you’ve still got all this time after dinner to study.

So, you’ve got plenty of time to pick up the phone, call a friend, and have a chat. As a result, eventually after dinner and at the end of the night, you’ve started doing a little bit of study, and you tell yourself that you’ve completed six hours of study. The reality, however, is that you have not actually completed six hours of study. In fact, you know, you’re tired, you’re lacking energy, and you haven’t really completed anything effective.

You’ve spent a lot of time doing what I call dead time, which is not studying and not relaxing. The two hours of study has actually expanded into the total available six hours of time that you gave yourself on that afternoon and that night.

So, as a result, how does sport help or how does exercise help you deal with this issue of Parkinson’s law? It’s really quite simple. But effectively, what sport does is it reduces the amount of time that you have available to study.

And I know this sounds counterintuitive. I know it sounds a little bit crazy. But the key is actually in reducing the amount of study time that you have available. Let’s take another look at that typical afternoon session that you would have. You know, if you have sport, it means that you cannot let your work expand. You have to be efficient.

So for example, if you have sports training from 7 to 9 p.m., it means that you have to complete your study before you go to sport. So when you come home from school, you can’t procrastinate. You can’t watch TV or surf the net. You’ve got to get down and complete the study that you’ve allocated.

So essentially what this means is that it’ll improve your efficiency because you’ll get more done in the two hours before sport than you would across the whole night that you’d have. And as a result, what that does is it improves your time management.

The overall consequence, therefore, is that it allows you to learn more in less time. And ultimately, when you’re in Year 12 and you’ve got lots of commitments, that’s exactly what you want to achieve. You want to get more done in the limited time that you have available.

Now, the second reason why sport or exercise will actually help you throughout the year in improving your grades is that it contributes to something called endorphins.

Now, what are endorphins? Essentially, endorphins are a chemical response in our body that occurs after we exercise. So generally, our body creates these endorphins when we exercise or play sport, and endorphins are the chemicals that make us happy. They’re the chemicals that make us feel good.

So one of the key reasons why you want to continue to, you know, exercise and play sport during the year is it’ll make you happier, and it actually reduces your stress levels. Because let’s face it, it can get quite stressful with lots of assessments during the year. So sport and exercise is a great way to help you remain sane.

This is actually why the psychologist that the top-performing student I mentioned earlier as a case study recommended that he play sport. It’s a natural solution to depression because it gets those endorphins or those happy chemicals going in your body.

Now, the final reason why sport or exercise is important, and you should balance it throughout the year with your study, is because it’s fun. I mean, let’s, you know, if we really think about it, studying all the time is incredibly boring. You know, I wouldn’t want to come home and look at my calendar and realize, “Oh, I’ve got six hours of studying to do today.”

So by adding some sport or some exercise into your afternoon, it varies the afternoon up, and it makes it a lot more fun.

So overall, sport will help you get better grades. It’ll help you by improving your time management through improving the negative impacts of Parkinson’s law. It’ll help you learn more in less time. It’ll help you feel happier through an endorphin rush, and it also, you know, creates a little bit of fun in an otherwise boring schedule.

So look, if you’ve liked this video, subscribe for updates. We will be having lots more coming out over the course of the next year. Until next time, cheers.

Video by Art of Smart