To sit or to cycle: which is best for students?

So-called “active desks” – sit/stand desks, desk bikes with pedals (known as cycling desks) and traditional stationary bikes – are increasingly being made available in schools and workplaces. Unfortunately, however, they rarely come with proper instructions on how to use them.

“It’s a bit like pedometers 20 years ago: the hope was that simply telling people to walk 10,000 steps a day, without any further explanation, would solve people’s problems with having a sedentary lifestyle – and that didn’t turn out to be true,” recalled Marie-Eve Mathieu, a professor in Université de Montréal’s School of Kinesiology and Physical Activity Sciences. “Exercise is great, but how can it contribute to the learning process?”

To find out, Mathieu and her doctoral student François Dupont focused on three ways to study: working at a traditional desk (sedentary), a small cycling desk (low-intensity) or a stationary bike (medium intensity). Funded by UdeM’s Programme d’appui aux initiatives de soutien à la réussite, the researchers sought to compare the effects of sedentariness and exercise intensity on attention, memory and anxiety among active desk users.

Their research was published in Devember in the .

Measuring attention levels

For the experiment, 24 students visited UdeM’s Physical Activity and Health Lab. In a setting mimicking a realistic office environment, each participant watched a 30-minute video: once while seated at a traditional desk, once while using a cycling desk and once on a stationary bike.

As they watched the videos, the students wore digital “smart” glasses to track their eye movements and thereby measure their attention levels. The participants then took a short-term memory test on UdeM’s only Studium platform.

In terms of learning, the results when participants engaged in low-intensity exercise (the cycling desk) were just as good, if not better, than when they remained sedentary. In contrast, the stationary bike (medium intensity) required too much effort for users to remain attentive.

“Participants on the stationary bikes were out of breath,” said Dupont. “We know that while individuals are completing cognitive-motor tasks, having to deal with physical exertion may reduce their cognitive capacity. In other words, it’s harder for them to stay focused on learning-related tasks.”

Those on the stationary bikes watched eight fewer minutes of the video compared to when they were sitting at the traditional desk. In addition, their score on the memory test was 9 per cent  lower. The low-intensity activity (cycling desk) did not have a detrimental effect on learning; in fact, a slight improvement was noted.

In terms of anxiety reduction, however, the stationary bike was the clear winner. Medium-intensity exercise led to a slight drop in anxiety, particularly when participants took the memory test. This modest result aligns with existing findings in the research literature, according to which medium to high-intensity physical activity may be an effective tool to manage anxiety.

Too often sedentary

It’s commonly thought that the benefits of low-intensity physical activity are easily lost. But even following officially recommended physical-activity guidelines (that is, doing at least 150 minutes of medium- to high-intensity exercise a week) doesn’t fully offset the impact of being sedentary.

“Even though someone may stay active by going to the gym or playing sports several times a week, their overall lifestyle may still be sedentary” – that is, they still spend too much time sitting down or in front of a computer screen all day long, said Mathieu.

“The problem in Canadian universities,” added Dupont, “is that students sit for 9.8 hours a day on average, even though the recommended maximum is 8 hours. And negative physical and mental health impacts begin to appear after only 6 hours.”

Active desks thus appear to be an attractive solution to sedentary behaviour. “It doesn’t take any extra time because you’re exercising while doing something else,” Mathieu pointed out.

In his master’s program, Dupont observed that by using different types of active desks (sit-stand and cycling desks), two hours of sedentary time during the workday could be offset by low-intensity physical exercise.

Depending on users’ tasks, preferences, needs and moods, active solutions can be used in multiple ways: cycling while studying course notes to reduce stress, for example, or sitting on an exercise ball during a videoconference.

“We need to make sedentary tasks more active while keeping the primary goal – working – in mind,” said Mathieu.

Diet may be affected, too

What’s next? “We’re now studying the dietary response measured during this research project, determining whether exercising while learning has any effects on what people have for their next meal,” said Mathieu. “We’d also like to test active desks in classrooms: we could re-run this same study focusing on exercise duration rather than intensity.”

With UdeM’s Human Resources Department, she is also working on a series of videos aimed at encouraging university administrators to explore the benefits of active desks, which are now more and more available even if “many people don’t know how to use them,” she noted.

One thing is certain: there will be no shortage of research on the subject in coming years, given that jobs are increasingly sedentary, even moreso for people working from home, Mathieu noted. “Research on sedentariness is still in its infancy. It’s a whole new field to discover.”