Exercise and life satisfaction: self-rated health and depression as parallel mediators

Introduction Exercise participation is associated with life satisfaction, but whether the physical-health or the mental-health channel carries more of that association has not been tested in recent national data. Methods Drawing on data from the 2024–2025 Chinese National Sports and Society Survey, a large-scale national survey ( N = 11,385; complete-case analytic N = 7,858), this study constructed and tested a parallel mediation model in which exercise participation is the independent variable, self-rated health and depression (reversed) are two parallel mediators, and life satisfaction is the outcome. The model was estimated by ordinary least squares with heteroskedasticity-consistent (HC3) standard errors, the indirect effects were tested with 5,000 nonparametric bootstrap resamples (percentile and bias-corrected), and the two specific indirect effects were compared with a formal bootstrap contrast.. Results Exercise participation showed a significant positive total association with life satisfaction ( c = 0.486, p < 0.001). Both indirect pathways were significant—via self-rated health (0.118, 95% BC CI [0.064, 0.175]) and via reversed depression (0.151, 95% BC CI [0.067, 0.241])—but the two estimates were close, and the contrast between them was small with an interval that included zero (0.034, 95% BC CI [−0.038, 0.109]), so these data do not show that the mental-health channel carries more of the association than the physical-health channel. After both mediators were entered, the direct association remained significant ( c ′ = 0.217, p = 0.009), and the two indirect associations together accounted for 55.3% of the total association (0.269/0.486); both health appraisals therefore carry a similar share of the association. Discussion The findings offer an empirical reference for national fitness and mental-health promotion under the Healthy China strategy, and they point to the psychological side of exercise as relevant alongside the somatic side.