A bike ride before class has made a clear difference for one Wisconsin fifth grader with ADHD.

Jimmy G., whose name has been changed to protect his privacy as a minor, used to be “up in everybody’s business, up and out of his chair, constantly blurting stuff out,” according to Amy Young, his science and social studies teacher at Spooner Middle School in the North Woods of Wisconsin.

But after he started attending a cycling class, Young said his behaviour changed. “After riding, he can sit down, he’s focused, he gets right down to work,” she says. “He’s like a different kid!”

Jimmy, 10, has been diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and takes medication for it. Young said cycling still makes a noticeable difference, something his parents have also recognised.

The class is taught by physical education teacher Ryan McKinney and began through cycling nonprofit Outride’s Riding for Focus program.

Outride, formerly the Specialized Bike Foundation, was founded by Mike Sinyard, who also founded bicycle brand Specialized. Fourteen years ago, Sinyard, who has ADHD, noticed that going for a bike ride helped him focus.

After a ride, he found he was more attentive in meetings. “That really kicked off this bigger idea, ‘Is this something that is unique to him, or is there broader science to back it up?” says Esther Walker, Ph.D., Outride’s executive director and a cognitive science researcher.

In 2012, Sinyard partnered with RTSG Neuroscience Consulting to launch a pilot project at two middle schools in Natick, Massachusetts. Students biked for 30 minutes before school, five days a week, for a month.

Walker said the results were encouraging. Kids with ADHD saw symptoms improve, and every child benefited. “Teachers saw improvements in focus and better performances in those classes directly after riding,” Walker says.

Those results led Sinyard to found the Specialized Foundation in 2014 to expand cycling classes to middle schools across the country. The foundation announced Riding for Focus grants in 2015, offering bikes, helmets and annual teacher training events. In 2019, it changed its name to Outride.

Today, the program is in 400 middle schools in the United States and Canada. Walker said 85 percent of those schools are Title I schools or have a free and reduced lunch rate of at least 40 percent. Others tend to serve students with special needs, including dyslexia, ADHD or autism spectrum disorder.

Walker said Specialized’s involvement has helped the program succeed. The company designed Riding for Focus bikes to hold up to daily use by middle school students for years.

“The bikes are color-coded by size, and have nice big numbers on the seat posts. So the students come in and say, ‘OK: I’m going to be on a blue bike, and, you know, level three for my seat,’’ Walker says. “It really gives them all a level playing field to try the same bikes, learn about shifting bikes safely, and build confidence on the bikes.”

About seven million children and teens in the United States have been diagnosed with ADHD, making it the most common neuro-developmental disorder in that age group.

Research has shown exercise supports mood, mental health and cognitive benefits including increased executive function, focus and self-regulation in children with ADHD. Some studies have focused on cycling.

Outride has supported multiple studies, including two at Stanford. One, published in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise in 2019, used functional near-infrared spectroscopy, or fNIRS, to look at blood flow in the brain in real time during exercise.

Building on that work, Stephanie van Riper and colleagues at Stanford used fNIRS on teens while they were cycling. They found teens with ADHD showed brain activity patterns that became more like the control group’s while cycling.

The researchers also found teens with ADHD were still overloaded more easily when they did mental tasks while cycling. But doing both at the same time appeared to prime the brain for better focus after riding.

Other research on cycling, cognition and teen mental health has been done at Loma Linda University School of Medicine, the University of Tennessee and the University of Wyoming, where Dr Cynthia Hartung is studying college students with ADHD.

Walker said there has not been much research showing cycling is better than other forms of exercise for cognitive improvements in teens with ADHD, but students seem to enjoy it.

“Anecdotally, we’ve had teachers tell us that cycling attracts many of their students that typically don’t like P.E. or avoid team sports,” Walker says.

At Spooner, McKinney first launched Riding for Focus with Outride’s support, including bikes, helmets, teacher training and a full curriculum. He later started an after-school Bike Club.

He said parents quickly noticed changes. “Some of the parents at the time said things like, ‘My kid is such a different kid on the nights he has Bike Club. Other nights, he’ll be a couch potato. I wish the kid could be in Bike Club every day.”

That response led McKinney to look at cycling during the school day. Spooner has a daily intervention class called What I Need, or WIN, for students who need extra help. Most students in WIN use an online program for maths or reading.

In the fall of 2021, McKinney asked teachers to recommend fifth and sixth grade students who struggled with attention, focus or behaviour. Those students were split into two groups. Twelve joined McKinney’s daily WIN class, which was mostly cycling, with some cross-country skiing and snowshoeing in winter. Another 12 stayed in a typical WIN class. Forty-eight students took part in the study in total, 24 in fifth grade and 24 in sixth grade.

After the 45-minute WIN class, students went straight to core classes, usually maths, science, English or social studies. At the end of class, teachers rated each student’s level of focus on a scale of one to four, and students also rated themselves.

Students also took a standardised test called FastBridge three times during the year to measure reading and maths comprehension.

McKinney said the results were “astonishing.” In maths, students in the cycling intervention group improved on average twice as much as students in the control group. In reading, they improved nearly twice as much. The cycling group also needed much less office discipline on average.

McKinney tracked the data for three years and said he has now gathered enough evidence to keep cycling in school long term. His cycling-before-school WIN class is no longer supported by Outride, but Spooner has kept cycling in its curriculum.

The school also received one of Outride’s Community Impact Grants to support a pump track and bike skills park, then another grant a few years later that funded fat tyre bikes.

Walker said schools often build on the initial grant. “The Riding for Focus program is often the spark that gets schools going, and over time they adapt and add more in, like after school clubs, trails and so on.”

Read more from Reasons to be Cheerful.