Background/Purpose
Regular physical activity benefits children's health through positive effects on growth and development, body composition, psychological well-being, and social interaction (WHO, 2009). In addition, physical activity has been shown to impact the components of health-related fitness (Welk et al., 2000). The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between physical activity and health-related physical fitness levels of Caucasian and Hispanic middle school students.
Method
Participants were 222 sixth-eighth grade students (107 boys, 115 girls; 60% Hispanic, 40% Caucasian). Mean age for all students was 12 years. Physical activity was determined through step count, activity time, and steps per minute. Participants wore the Walk4Life 2505 pedometer for four consecutive school days, which simultaneously recorded both step count and activity time. Physical fitness was assessed based on the results of six FitnessGram tests.
Analysis/Results
Boys accumulated significantly more steps/day (9,454 ± 3,364 vs. 7,872 ± 2,749) than girls (p ≤ .016). Post-hoc comparisons revealed that sixth grade students took significantly more steps (9,282 ± 3,548) than seventh or eighth grade students (7,931 ± 2,510 vs. 8,198 ± 2,797) respectively. No significant differences in steps/day were reported between Caucasian and Hispanic students (p = .261). There were no significant findings for activity time (p = 0.02) and steps/minute (p = 0.658) by gender, grade, or ethnicity. Pearson correlations reported low to moderate relationships between physical activity and physical fitness variables. An overall significant, positive correlation was reported between PACER and step count (0.37, p ≤ .0001) as well as PACER and activity time (0.30, p ≤ .0001). Steps/day and activity time were significantly correlated with push-ups and curl-ups in Hispanic students (p ≤ .05).
Conclusions
Consistent with other studies, boys took more steps than girls, and relationships between physical activity and physical fitness variables were low to moderate (Beighle & Pangrazi, 2006; Morrow & Freedson, 1994). Results present new evidence that specific components of health-related fitness are globally associated with physical activity in middle school students. It cannot be concluded, however, that improved health related fitness components are the result of additional activity. Rather, results confirm that middle school students with higher aerobic fitness accumulated more steps/day and activity time than students with lower aerobic fitness. While it has been generally concluded that minority children are less active (Lindquist et al., 1999) when compared with Caucasian children, such was not true in this study.