Evaluation of Age and Gender Patterns in Physical Fitness

Background/Purpose: The large and distributed sample of the NFL PLAY 60 FITNESSGRAM Partnership project provides a unique opportunity to study grade and gender patterns of physical activity and physical fitness. This presentation will summarize the patterns in achievement of FITNESSGRAM Healthy Fitness Zones (HFZ) by school, gender and grade over four semesters (Fall 2010 to Spring 2012).

Method: A total of 189852 FITNESSGRAM records were processed across the four semesters. The data on aerobic capacity and BMI were compiled, cleaned and aggregated by grade-level to compute the percentage of students achieving HFZ on both aerobic capacity and BMI.

Analysis/Results: There were 630 grade-level records of aerobic capacity and 736 grade-level records of BMI available for analyses. For aerobic capacity, the percentage of youth achieving HFZ were higher for elementary schools (range: 66.5%-91.1%) than middle schools (range: 57.3%--79.9%) and high schools (range: 51.5%--68.8%). Boys have achieved higher percentage of aerobic capacity HFZ than girls across all grade-level comparisons. For BMI, the achievement of the HFZ was similar across grade levels (range: 52.2%--73.9%) than middle schools (range: 55.1%--66.5%) and high schools (range: 59.0%--85.5%). Girls had higher percentage of BMI HFZ than boys across all grade-level for four trials except for high school girls for trial 3 and 4 where they were lower than the boys.

Conclusions: There are clear gender varied patterns in percentage of HFZ achievement for both aerobic capacity and BMI. The presentation will summarize these patterns and describe the Additional research is needed to understand school level factors that may explain the variability in fitness outcomes across school.