The miracle mile school program catches on.
Six years ago, an elementary teacher at a small school in Scotland was so shocked by her students’ lack of fitness, she took her class outside for a 15-minute run around the yard.
The kids enjoyed it so much, she made a deal to do it every day for a month. The idea caught on, and not only did every teacher in the school soon incorporate a 15-minute run into the school day, half the elementary schools in Scotland and several others in Europe and North America have adopted the program.
The concept is simple: kids run outside once a day for 15 minutes, whenever their teacher thinks it’s a good time to get moving. There’s no set pace or uniform.
Some kids run. Some walk. And some do a bit of both — all wearing whatever they had on in the classroom. If it’s cold or raining, they grab a coat.
Called the Daily Mile — named for the distance covered if the children run the full 15 minutes — the program has shown success not just in its simplicity, but in the almost immediate buy-in by kids, teachers and school administrators. The kids love leaving the classroom for some fresh air and a jog around the schoolyard. The teachers love the change they see in the kids’ behaviour and attentiveness after the run. And the administrators love that it’s easy on the budget.
The idea is so popular, it’s starting to find its way into high schools and the workplace. Younger kids aren’t the only ones who need to incorporate more exercise into their daily routine. They’re also not the only ones who can benefit from a pick-me-up when concentration and productivity start waning.
The program has the endorsement of British Prime Minister Theresa May and Scottish health officials. It also caught the attention of a team of Scottish researchers who put the Daily Mile to the test to see what kind of impact it had on the health and fitness of children.
The researchers recruited two elementary schools — one that was adopting the Daily Mile and one that wasn’t. Students from both schools (371 in total) all wore accelerometers to determine their daily movement and sedentary patterns, and participated in tests to determine overall fitness and body composition.
It turns out the impact of a 15-minute run around the yard goes far beyond letting kids shake out some of their excess energy. Seven months after the adoption of the Daily Mile, the kids in the study had added 9.1 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity to their day (since most kids spend the 15 minutes alternating between walking and running, not all of their activity qualifies as moderate to vigorous).