How to get Irish teenagers exercising more

From first year to fourth year, most Irish secondary school boys get fitter and stronger.

However, the fitness of Irish girls doesn’t improve during that time. This makes them less likely to meet the minimum current physical recommendations for optimal health.

In first year, boys are 32% fitter than girls but by fourth year boys are 42% fitter – so what happens to widen this fitness gap?

Professor Niall Moyna from the Centre for Preventive Medicine, DCU, is well known from television health programmes and has been involved in developing the Irish Schools Fitness Challenge, an initiative that has given a major insight into Ireland’s teenagers’ fitness levels – or lack of.

Over 20,000 teenagers took part in the fourth year of the event, which is now sponsored by Irish Life Health.

“We need to invest a lot more money in activity and sport among our young girls,” he says. “They’ve been neglected for too long. As we go through first year to fourth year with the boys, their fitness levels increase – they’re getting bigger and stronger.

“Girls’ fitness levels don’t change at all, however. The fitness levels of fourth year girls is exactly the same as that of first year girls and that’s worrying.”

The bad news doesn’t stop there either.

Professor Moyna believes the figures may not be telling the true story.

“I think it’s a biased sample, to be honest, because the girls who are measured in fourth year as well as in first year are the girls who are continuing to be physically active. The ones who are no longer physically active don’t take part in the test.

“We have to take a much more holistic view and make sure that girls – and boys – get to 18 years of age in a healthier state. The best predictor of a person’s health and how long they are going to live is their cardiovascular fitness,” he says.

If Professor Moyna had his way, it would be compulsory in secondary schools for every teenager to get some form of exercise three times a day.

“I’d introduce a new curriculum course called life science where they’d learn not just about exercise but about all the other risk factors for disease – tobacco, alcohol, stress, inactivity – and learn how all those affect their organs. They’d learn how to read food labels and do simple cooking too.”

It's the no exercise that's killing us prematurely

But is it not difficult to get girls to like PE?

With an Irish Life Health survey among PE teachers relating that 96% of them believe students make excuses to get out of doing PE, does self-consciousness and concern about hair and make-up put some girls off wanting to exercise?

“It’s the way you introduce exercise,” Professor Moyna says.

“I think if you told a group of girls to go into a room and come up with a dance routine they’d forget about the hair and make-up. Once you mention the word sport or exercise it puts some girls off.

“Yes, there is a number of young girls who go to school and as soon as they sweat or the make-up starts to run, all hell breaks loose. But we have to be in there finding ways, even if it’s only 10-minute breaks where they can walk around the school yard. We need to be constantly promoting the need to be physically active. Any form of activity is better than none. It’s the nothing that’s killing us prematurely.”

Start health education at age four

Education about healthy living just doesn’t start early enough, he believes. It should start at age four, not 12.

“The problem is that kids come to secondary school and they haven’t learned about healthy lifestyle behaviours, so you’re trying to switch them over but that’s far too late.

“If a girl gets to 12 used to having three periods of activity a day – not necessarily sport – then that will have become a normal part of her life.”

The Schools Fitness Challenge was an initiative started in 2012 to make children more aware of the importance of physical fitness.

“When a child goes to a doctor, no one measures the most important indicator of their health – their cardiovascular fitness.

“Most kids don’t know what it is so I thought it was important to develop an initiative that would make kids aware of their current cardiovascular fitness and then see how much they can improve that over six weeks,” he says.

“You get the biggest improvement in the people who are the least fit and they are the people you’re really after – you want to show them that, with minimal effort, over a six-week period they can have a tremendous improvement in overall fitness, which in turn will significantly improve their health.”

Shock statistics came out last year showing that some transition year boys were found to have the blood vessels of men aged 60.

“Prior to this, parents were saying: ‘Mary’s fine, Johnny’s fine.’ But all of a sudden you give them this information and you show them that there is a direct connection between a child’s fitness level and their overall health. That message is starting to resonate now.”

What the schools fitness test involves

In the test, teenagers complete a number of shuttle runs.

“An audio bleep sounds and the duration between the bleeps gets shorter and you have to keep up with it. The total number of runs or bleeps that a teenager can do is recorded. Six weeks later the test is repeated and the results noted.”

Professor Moyna has no doubt about what the goal should be.

“I’ve been saying for years that if a young boy can do 100 runs and a female can do 70 in their Leaving Certificate year, I would actually give them €5,000.

“That’s because if you can do that at that age, the likelihood of you being obese, having high blood pressure or having any of the risk factors for disease that we spend 70% of our healthcare budget on, would be almost zero.”

Need to change way of thinking

We need a paradigm shift in our thinking, he believes.

“Let’s focus on getting kids to adopt healthy behaviour and that becoming the norm. Politicians need to take the long-term view. Improvements now would show up in the next generation.”