The Influence of Motivators and Barriers to Exercise on Attaining Physical Activity and Sedentary Time Guidelines among Canadian Undergraduate Students
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canadian 24 h movement guidelines recommend engaging in >150 min/week of moderate–vigorous-intensity physical activity and ≤8 h/day of sedentary time. Half of Canadian post-secondary students do not meet physical activity or sedentary time guidelines. This pan-Canadian study aimed to (1) identify commonly cited motivators/barriers to exercise, and (2) determine which motivators/barriers were most influential for attaining physical and sedentary activity guidelines. A total of 341 respondents (279 females, 23 ± 4 years old, 53% met activity guidelines, 49% met sedentary guidelines) completed an online survey regarding undergraduate student lifestyle behaviours. Improved physical health (74% of respondents), mental health (67%), physical appearance (60%), and athletic performance (28%) were the most common motivators to exercise. The most common barriers were school obligations (68%), time commitments (58%), job obligations (32%), and lack of available fitness classes (26%). Students citing improved athletic performance (odds ratio (OR) = 1.94, p = 0.02) were more likely to adhere to activity guidelines, while those who selected physical health (OR = 0.56, p = 0.03) and physical appearance (OR = 0.46, p = 0.001) as motivators were less likely to meet activity guidelines. Students who cited school obligations as a barrier were less likely (OR = 0.59, p = 0.03) to meet sedentary guidelines. The motivators and barriers identified provide a foundation for university-led initiatives aimed at promoting physical activity and reducing sedentary time among undergraduate students. Strategies that positively re-frame students’ physical health and appearance-based motivations for exercise may be particularly useful in helping more students achieve national activity recommendations.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".