Increased awareness of the health benefits of physical activity has lead to a demand for initiatives that reduce sedentary lifestyles. Health professionals, schools, communities, and parents should be actively involved in promoting physical activity ...
Increased awareness of the health benefits of physical activity has lead to a demand for initiatives that reduce sedentary lifestyles. Health professionals, schools, communities, and parents should be actively involved in promoting physical activity among children and adolescents, because many children and young adults already have risk factors for chronic disease associated with adult morbidity and mortality. Obesity is increasing among children and is related to physical inactivity.
The purposes to this study were as follows 1) to determine how exercise and sedentary type elementary school children differs on health-related physical fitness tests, 2) to determine what kind of physical activity or sedentary pattern differs on their health-related physical fitness level. The subjects in this study were 162 male and 145 female elementary school students attending Seoul city area 4 public and private elementary schools. Data were collected for each subjects on 5 health-related physical fitness test items and physical activity questionnaires items. To accurately determine the prevalence of physical activity(and inactivity) in the subjects, to identify the relationship between activity and measure of human performance(fitness), self-report measure are the most frequently used.
The present study provides strong evidence that devoting substantially increased school time to physical activity have positive effects on health-related physical fitness. The present results shows that there were gender differences on physical activity and inactivity pattern in elementary school children. Physical active attitude on school time may have favorable effects on students's physical fitness.