Skill building helps teens become more active
Last Updated: 2006-11-23 13:00:34 -0400 (Reuters Health)
By Anne Harding
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Teaching high-school students some time management and coping skills helps them to become more active, and is particularly effective for getting sedentary students moving, Ohio researchers report.
After the program, the percentage of students who reported getting no moderate leisure-time exercise at all during the course of a week fell from about 47 percent to 9 percent, while the average amount of moderate exercise the students got roughly tripled, Drs. Brian Hortz of Denison University in Granville, Ohio and Rick Petosa of Ohio State in Columbus report.
"What we did was created a program that was essentially to build skills that were similar to what adults would use to build activity into their lifestyles," Hortz told Reuters Health. He pointed out that public health efforts to boost teens' activity levels generally focus on time spent in PE class, without looking at how to help young people become more active in their time away from school.
Hortz and Petosa note that people's activity levels begin to decline in adolescence. Given that kids seem to become less active as they begin to take on grown-up roles like working a job, dating, and driving, Hortz said, it makes sense that teaching them skills adults with busy lives use to stay active could be helpful.
To investigate, Hortz developed an exercise program delivered once a week for eight weeks as part of PE class. The 143 students who participated were instructed on setting goals, monitoring themselves, figuring out why a goal isn't reached, and finding support and ideas from their peers.
Participants kept a diary of their non-school-time physical activity in 30-minute blocks from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. for one week before the program and for another week afterwards.
Before the program, students averaged .89 days of moderate physical exercise per week, which rose to a total of 2.94 days after the program. Vigorous exercise rose from .90 days to 1.57 days.
Among the comparison group of 97 students who did not participate in the program, the amount of moderate exercise rose from 1.34 to 1.81 days, and vigorous exercise increased from 1.22 to 1.84.
The effects were most dramatic for the "hard-core sedentary individuals," Hortz noted. "They could tailor it to their likes and dislikes rather than having someone come into a classroom and say you have to do x, y, or z," he said. Walking was a particularly popular exercise choice among participants, Hortz added, especially the formerly sedentary teens.
He and his colleagues are now evaluating the program as delivered by PE teachers in 12 schools in Appalachia. The early results are in, and are good so far, Hortz said.
SOURCE: Journal of Adolescent Health, October 2006.
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