How Active Should Your Adolescent Be?

The Surgeon General's report made clear that the health benefits of physical activity are not limited to adults. Regular participation in physical activity during childhood and adolescence:

Helps build and maintain healthy bones, muscles, and joints.

Helps control weight, build lean muscle, and reduce fat.

Prevents or delays the development of high blood pressure and helps reduce blood pressure in some adolescents with hypertension.

Reduces feelings of depression and anxiety.

With an ever increasing amount of overweight children. As schools are dropping physical education from their programs, adolescents are finding ways to use their free time without being active. To know how much is enough, the International Consensus Conference on Physical Activity Guidelines for Adolescents issued the following recommendations:

1. All adolescents should be physically active daily, or nearly every day, as part of play, games, sports, work, transportation, recreation, physical education, or planned exercise, in the context of family, school, and community activities.

2. Adolescents should engage in three or more sessions per week of activities that last 20 minutes or more at a time and that require moderate to vigorous levels of exertion.

Healthy People 2010, the national initiative that established health objectives for the first decade of this century, includes objectives to increase levels of moderate and vigorous physical activity among adolescents, to increase the proportion of trips made by walking and bicycling, and to decrease the amount of time people spend watching television.

Here are some ways parents and guardians can help:

1. Encourage children to be active on a regular basis

2. Be a physically active role model.

3. Set limits on the amount of time children spend watching television and playing video or computer games.

4. Plan and participate in family activities that include physical activity (e.g., walking or bicycling together instead of driving, doing active chores like vacuuming and mowing the lawn, playing outside) and include physical activity in family events such as birthday parties, picnics, and vacations.

5. Facilitate participation by children in school and community physical activity and sports programs.

6. Advocate for quality school and community physical activity programs.

Through its effects on mental health, physical activity may help increase students' capacity for learning.

References

Sallis JF, Patrick K. Physical activity guidelines for adolescents: consensus statement. Pediatric Exercise Science 1994;6:302-14

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Healthy people 2010: understanding and improving health. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Government Printing Office, 2000.

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