The Effect of 10 Week Exercise Program on the Depression Level of the Adolescents

Introduction And Objective: Depression is the most common disease of our century which is a very serious individual and social mental disease due to its recurrence and chronicity rate, significant suicidal risk and its creating failure. The influences of exercise has been examined in several studies. This research is conducted in order to examine the influence of exercise on the depression level of adolescents. Method: This is a control group study with a pretest posttest design in which the adolescents perform regular exercises. The study is conducted with 40 high school senior students - 20 initiative and 20 control group subjects - who are studying in a high school in Antalya city. The initiative group is taken into a weekly ?5 day 50 minute? exercise program for 10 weeks. Beck depression scale is applied on the participants before ( week 0) and after (at the end of week 10) the exercise program. For the evaluation of the data, chi square, Mann Whitney U and Wilcoxon tests are utilized. Findings: The age average of the participant students is 17.04±1.17; also it is detected that 57% of them are female students and 24.2% of them are slightly overweight. While the depression level score average of the initiative group before the exercise program is 22.12±3.42, this score decreases to 15.32±2.47 after the program and this difference is found to be statistically significant (p 0.05).Conclusion: According to the results obtained, it is seen that the 10 week exercise program which is applied on the initiative group is influential on decreasing the depression level score averages of the adolescents. These findings might be a base for encouraging the students towards regular exercise to be able to have a better mental health.