School Based Physical Activity: Can it Work?

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Background

Many children and adolescents do not appear to be experiencing sufficient levels of physical activity to ensure their short- and long-term health. An inactive lifestyle has serious implications for the individual, and for societies in general, and it could be argued that we are failing our children and young people if we do not ensure they have positive attitudes to physical activity. Such positive attitudes could manifest as physically active lifestyles both when young and throughout the lifespan. Arguably, the direct and indirect costs of physical inactivity form a substantial, and preventable, health and economic challenge to society in many countries throughout the world. If the argument above is accepted, an obvious question is how to ensure children and young people can get enough physical activity daily and be educated to develop positive attitudes so that physically active behaviors may be maintained into and throughout adulthood. School offers an important and universal setting to implement interventions to to ensure all children have the opportunity to complete sufficient physical activity daily. However, often the focus in schools is on academic performance, and restricted resources and staffing may provide substantial obstacles to utilizing the school environment as the conduit for ensuring all children have the opportunity to complete sufficient physical activity daily.

In this research topic, we wish to gain insight into whether and how school-based interventions (or interventions which might be suitable for use in schools) could help increase physical activity in children and young people. This encompasses both physical activity undertaken in school and school-based interventions to increase children's’ physical activity outside of school. The research topic also seeks to understand the factors that are likely to elicit active lifestyles and those that do not.

• We welcome researchers to submit manuscripts of original research / intervention studies, or reviews and meta-analysis relating to school-based physical activity. In particular, we would welcome manuscripts which address the key research questions below: Physical inactivity in children and young people: is there a problem?
• What is physical education (PE) for? Is it unrealistic to expect PE classes to be the mechanism through which sufficient physical activity opportunities are delivered to children and adolescents.
• How much physical activity does a child / adolescent need to benefit their health? Should this not be guaranteed as part of a child / adolescent’s ‘education’.
• Does inactivity track, and therefore is it imperative we ‘intervene’ at a young age in settings such as schools?
• Interventions in schools: what has been done, does it work, and what have we learnt?
• Given current estimates of inactivity in children and adolescents, what might be the economic consequences of successful, school based interventions ?
• Can school ever supersede the influence of family or peers?
• How do we encourage / facilitate inactive children and young people to be sufficiently active?
• Is there a limit to how active a child or adolescent can be? Is there a ‘set-point’ for physical activity?
• Is the ‘physical inactivity problem’ simply one of implementation?

Keywords: health, physical fitness, physical education

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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