The influence of organized physical exercise on the time spent in MVPA of elementary school students

Abstract

The World Health Organization recommends daily physical activity for at least 60 minutes for children, while for adults this recommendation amounts to at least 30 minutes a day. As part of daily physical activity, it is recommended to exercise at a moderate to high intensity for at least 10 minutes. Today, we are increasingly faced with the problem of sedentariness in both adults and children. It is considered that a school is a place where children could be expected to be more physically active because they spend a lot of time there. The subject of this research concerns the time spent in moderate to high-intensity physical activity (MVPA) during one day. A systematic review of two electronic databases (PubMed and Mlibrary) identified a small number of studies that analyzed MVPA between boys and girls. In the studies, organized physical exercise is cited as a way to make children more interested in exercise than usual. The research results of three selected studies indicate that students are not sufficiently physically active and that there are no significant differences in MVPA values between boys and girls (8 to 14 years of age). On the basis of highly qualified scientific studies, including only studies that measured MVPA with an accelerometer, it is observed that boys achieved higher values and are therefore somewhat more physically active compared to girls.