I'm Flor Lichtenen and you're listening to Science Friday.

Happy Thanksgiving.

And today and the podcast, we're already dreading tomorrow when you might feel like you need to get your steps in.

So we're talking about exercise.

Besides making you feel better after an indulgent meal, we all know or at least have heard that workouts lift your mood, fight depression, make you more resilient when life knocks you down.

But it ain't about how hard you hit. It's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can

take and keep moving forward. But why exactly does exercise improve mental health? Is it all about

those endorphins? Does the type of workout or the duration matter if you're looking for a mental

wellness boost? Here to answer those questions and more

are Dr. Eduardo Esteban Bustamente. He studies the link between physical activity and mental

health in kids as the director of the Healthy Kids Lab at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

And Dr. Jack Raglan studies exercise and sports science as a professor of kinesiology at Indiana University

in Bloomington. Welcome to you both to Science Friday. Thank you. Glad to be here. Thanks for

having me. Jack, let's start with the basics. We've all heard exercise is good for our mental health.

How? Why? Well, I wish I could definitively answer that question, but truly we don't know.

It's long been thought to be exclusively due to endorphin, hormone that our body produces,

very similar to morphine and heroin. That certainly can be a part of it, but we know from studies

you can pharmacologically remove it from your system and people still feel better.

And there are a host of other biological and hormonal changes that also are likely contributors to that.

So my answer would be many things.

Yeah, it's such a big, it's such a big question.

You know, why does physical activity help with mental

...