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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Sport Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1567003
This article is part of the Research TopicTowards a Psychophysiological Approach in Physical Activity, Exercise, and Sports-Volume IVView all 18 articles
Experimental Research of Impact on Psychological State for Adolescents with High-Intensity Interval Training Intervention
Provisionally accepted
Yu -Tong Li1
Yang Zhou2*- 1Capital University of Physical Education and Sports, Beijing, China
- 2Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
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Current social pressures have led to increasingly prominent adolescent mental health problems, such as the incidence of anxiety, depression and other psychological disorders is increasing year by year. (HIIT has gradually become a potential means of intervening in adolescents' psychological state through the combination of short-term high-intensity exercise and intermittent recovery due to its unique training effect and time efficiency. In this study, an 8-week experiment was designed to quantitatively assess the effects of HIIT on psychological state using the Multidimensional Scale of Adolescent Psychological State (containing 7 dimensions of self-esteem, energy, tension, anger, depression, fatigue, and confusion) with 60 high school students from Handan City Sports School (30 in the experimental group and 30 in the control group). The experimental group underwent a HIIT intervention with a heart rate control of 172± 10 beats/minute, and the control group underwent a moderate-intensity continuous training with a heart rate of 132±10 beats/minute. The results of the study showed that: the experimental group showed a significant reduction in negative emotion indicators such as tension (p=0.002), depression (p=0.008), anger (p=0.001) and a significant increase in self-esteem (p=0.004) after the intervention; the control group only showed limited improvement in some indicators (e.g., tension and depression) (p<0.05) and the effect was weaker than that of the experimental group; the comparison between groups showed that. HIIT showed significantly better improvement in tension (Δ=1.8, p=0.00) and depression (Δ=0.8, p=0.017) than continuous training (p<0.01). This study verified the effectiveness of HIIT in alleviating anxiety and depression symptoms and enhancing self-esteem in adolescents through the dual pathways of stimulating endorphin and dopamine release and enhancing physical efficacy, providing empirical evidence for school physical education curriculum design and mental health interventions.
Keywords: High-intensity interval training, Psychology of adolescents, Training intervention, Psychological state influence, Mental Health
Received: 26 Jan 2025; Accepted: 18 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Li and Zhou. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Yang Zhou, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
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