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Abstract
Background The number of adults across the globe with significant depressive symptoms has grown substantially during the COVID-19 pandemic. The extant literature supports exercise as a potent behaviour that can significantly reduce depressive symptoms in clinical and non-clinical populations.
Objective Using a suite of mobile applications, at-home exercise, including high intensity interval training (HIIT) and/or yoga, was completed to reduce depressive symptoms in the general population in the early months of the pandemic.
Methods A 6-week, parallel, multiarm, pragmatic randomised controlled trial was completed with four groups: (1) HIIT, (2) Yoga, (3) HIIT+yoga, and (4) waitlist control (WLC). Low active, English-speaking, non-retired Canadians aged 18–64 years were included. Depressive symptoms were measured at baseline and weekly following randomisation.
Results A total of 334 participants were randomised to one of four groups. No differences in depressive symptoms were evident at baseline. The results of latent growth modelling showed significant treatment effects in depressive symptoms for each active group compared with the WLC, with small effect sizes (ESs) in the community-based sample of participants. Treatment groups were not significantly different from each other. Effect sizes were very large (eg, week 6 ES range=−2.34 to −2.52) when restricting the analysis only to participants with high depressive symptoms at baseline.
Conclusions At-home exercise is a potent behaviour to improve mental health in adults during the pandemic, especially in those with increased levels of depressive symptoms. Promotion of at-home exercise may be a global public health target with important personal, social and economic implications as the world emerges scathed by the pandemic.
Trial registration number NCT04400279.
- depression
- exercise
- randomised controlled trial
Data availability statement
Data are available in a public, open access repository. All of the individual participant data collected during the trial after de-identification, and reported in the manuscript, will be available at https://osf.io/g9xqp following publication. All of the protocols, statistical analysis plan, informed consent form, analytic code, will be available 4 months following trial's end. .
This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.
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Data availability statement
Data are available in a public, open access repository. All of the individual participant data collected during the trial after de-identification, and reported in the manuscript, will be available at https://osf.io/g9xqp following publication. All of the protocols, statistical analysis plan, informed consent form, analytic code, will be available 4 months following trial's end. .
Supplementary materials
Supplementary Data
This web only file has been produced by the BMJ Publishing Group from an electronic file supplied by the author(s) and has not been edited for content.
Supplementary Data
This web only file has been produced by the BMJ Publishing Group from an electronic file supplied by the author(s) and has not been edited for content.
Footnotes
Twitter @BeauchampDr
Correction notice This article has been corrected since it published Online First. The funding statement has been updated.
Contributors Study was conceptualised and designed by EP, MRB and NM. Implementation was completed by NM, BH, NG and JW. MSK (physician) and SH (exercise physiologist) reviewed the files of participants who did not meet clearance using our online screening tool. YL developed the analytic plan, and YL and BH completed data analyses. The first draft was completed by EP; all tables and figures were prepared by BH and reviewed by all other authors for comments.
Funding Funding for this research was provided by the Canada Research Chairs Program and Canadian Institutes of Health Research Grant # PJT 169211.
Competing interests None declared.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
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