According to the World Health Organization, children and teens should get at least an hour of moderate-to-vigorous activity. Unfortunately, studies show that only about 8 percent of this population actually achieves the 60-minute goal.
What’s more important, though, researchers investigated the activity habits of children and teens to find that most only get about 42 minutes a day. And more shocking, most adolescents get 23 of those 42 minutes walking around at school.
“We knew that schools were a major source of physical activity for kids. But, we were surprised that kids spent only 4.8 percent of their time at school physically active, the lowest of all locations,” explains study lead author Jordan Carlson, who is the director of community-engaged health research at Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City.
Unfortunately, adolescents are also losing this activity time on the weekends because they are not walking between classes six hours a day.
Basically, then, experts are advising that schools could, perhaps, do a better job of encouraging activity while they are in session.
Carlson continues, “Kids have a natural instinct to move around, and schools can support this by providing more opportunities for students to be active, such as by incorporating physical activity into the classroom.”
In addition, Orthopaedic Institute for Children associate director of sports medicine Dr. Jennifer Beck comments that this is a crucial time in history for us to address the childhood obesity problem. Diabetes, hypertension, and cholesterol and even malnutrition are all on the rise, even among children.
She says, “The most important implication coming out of this study is that we as a society — including parents, educators, health care providers and government officials — need to do more to promote a healthy, active lifestyle among our at-risk adolescents,” cautioning, though, this topic is complex. Thus, she says, everyone “should take care in drawing specific, concrete conclusions from the data.”
