Students are a group with high incidence of psychological conflicts, and students’ mental health problems bring hidden dangers to the healthy development of school education and social employment. For this reason, this paper launches a study on the changes in students’ mental health from the perspective of the physical education program and mental health of the Lai people. It analyzes students’ physical education courses, coping styles, psychological resilience and mental health through surveys using regression models, explores the correlations among the four variables, and based on this, the study verifies the mediating effects among physical education courses, coping styles, psychological resilience and mental health. Considering the low-level and high-level needs of mental health comprehensively, this paper defines mental health as the absence of mental diseases or perversions, and that the individual can maintain a good state physically, psychologically, as well as socially behaviorally. The mental health scale was constructed from five aspects, including happiness in life, willingness to learn, interpersonal harmony, calmness in exams and emotional stability, and its reliability and validity were tested. Finally, based on the constructed psychological scale, an empirical study was conducted on the improvement of students’ mental health by the Li physical education program, and the results of the study showed that the scores of all the dimensions before and after the Li physical education program were improved, and all of them were <0.05, which is an extremely significant difference. The study reveals, to a certain extent, the mechanism of the Li physical education program’s effect on mental health, and provides useful references and lessons for the construction of the Li physical education program in colleges and universities.