Native American Secondary Students' Steps and Moderate-to-Vigorous Physical Activity During Physical Education

Background/Purpose: The 2008 Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans call for youth to participate in 60 minutes of physical activity per day including aerobic, muscle building and bone strengthening exercises. Most youth are not meeting this recommendation particularly minority students, with Native American youth often reporting the lowest level of physical activity participation. It is important to learn more about the Moderate-to-Vigorous-Physical Activity (MVPA) participation of youth in physical education classes and especially Native American youth to order to develop strategies for effective interventions. Many of the previous reports of physical activity in physical education have used pedometry (i.e., did not address intensity). One report with upper elementary students described their time in MVPA during classes as mediocre. The purpose of this project was to understand more about MVPA opportunities for Native American Secondary students in daily physical education classes in one Native American community using the NL-1000 accelerometer (NL; New Lifestyles Inc., Lee's Summit, Missouri, USA).

Methods: Fifty-seven Native American students (grades 7-9) participated from one community in the Southwestern USA (62% boys, 38% girls; average BMI=27.92±6.02). Participants' parents typically described youth's ethnic background as Pima with 75% indicating they belonged to the Tribal community. Students wore the NL-1000 accelerometer for up to eight consecutive days in their daily (5x/week) 40 minute Physical Education classes. Accelerometry has been shown to produce reliable and valid data in this age group (McClain et al., 2007). A few different activities were taught in physical education; however, it was primarily basketball. Analysis/Results: Analyses included descriptive statistics and t-tests looking for gender differences. Boys averaged 3772 steps (SD=700.39) and 13.31 minutes MVPA (SD= 4.76) per class. Girls averaged 3493 steps (SD=536.48) and 14.55 minutes MVPA (SD=4.73). Although girls were more active than boys, their increased steps and time in MVPA can be attributed to the girls' certified physical education teacher while the boys' teacher had a minor in physical education and less structure to his classes. Gender differences were not statistically significant. Conclusions: The steps accrued by both boys and girls during physical education were promising. Other researchers (Pangrazi et al., 2003) have suggested an average of 2,000/steps for 30 minutes of class (or 67 steps/min) is reasonable, so these Native American students gained more than typical steps (90 steps/min). Although students were slightly short of spending half of their physical education class time in MVPA, this time is greater than previously reported and encouraging.