Despite the increasing interest in analysing determinants of health status and subjective wellbeing, existing research has been mainly confined to developed countries’ adult population. This paper estimates the effect of physical exercise on the health and happiness of Chinese adolescent. Using a comprehensive database from the China Education Panel Survey (number of observations: 5975), different methodologies, including instrumental variable and propensity score matching approaches, are applied. We find that physical exercise has a significantly positive effect on health. Our results also suggest some evidence of a positive impact of exercise on well-being. This effect is robust to different econometric approaches, exercise participation measurements, and characteristics of students and schools and families. However, exercise benefits become evident even when it is practised with low frequency, i.e. one day per week. Moreover, physical exercise exerts a higher impact on students with poorer health and higher levels of unhappiness. Our results highlight the the beneficial impact of political decisions aiming to incentivize physical exercise to improve adolescents’ health status in developing countries