The impact of college students’ physical exercise on subjective well-being: a chain-mediation model involving psychological resilience and social support with gender as the moderator

Based on the background of Healthy China, this study took 494 college students as the subjects, collected data using the Physical Activity Rating Scale, Perceived Social Support Scale, Adolescent Resilience Scale, and Subjective Well-being Scale, and constructed a chained mediation model using SmartPLS software to explore the mechanism of physical exercise on subjective well-being and the moderating effect of gender. The study found that although physical exercise cannot directly predict subjective well-being, it indirectly enhances well-being through the chained mediation path of “social support —> resilience”. This mediating effect becomes significant only when an individual’s social support translates into psychological resilience.Specifically, physical exercise can significantly enhance social support and resilience, and high levels of social support significantly positively predict resilience, which in turn directly and significantly promotes subjective well-being; Bootstrap tests confirmed the significant chained path effect of “physical exercise —> social support —> resilience —> subjective well-being”. The study also revealed that gender plays a significant moderating role in the path of “social support —> subjective well-being”: social support positively predicts subjective well-being in males but negatively predicts it in females; further moderated chained mediation tests indicated that the above chained mediation effect is only significant in the female group (effect size = 0.129, 95% CI [0.011, 0.242]), but not in the male group. The conclusion suggests that physical exercise indirectly enhances college students’ subjective well-being by enhancing social support and resilience, and this mechanism exhibits significant gender differences. It is recommended that in practice, social support networks in physical activities should be strengthened for males, while for females, attention should be paid to stress management in a high-support environment and the cultivation of their positive coping abilities. At the same time, resilience cultivation should be integrated into the physical exercise process to achieve targeted mental health promotion.