30 Year Trends of Reduced Physical Fitness in Undergraduate Students Studying Human Movement
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The physical fitness of Canadian adults has decreased over the past 30 years, while sedentary time has increased. However, it is unknown if university students studying human movement exhibit similar population declines. Physical fitness (i.e., anthropometrics, musculoskeletal fitness, and aerobic fitness) and habitual activity (e.g., physical activity, stationary time, etc.) was measured in a cohort of kinesiology students (Post30; 2010–2016; n = 129 males, 224 females) using standardized fitness testing and accelerometry, respectively. Physical fitness was compared to data collected on a cohort of students from the same institution and program, 30 years prior (i.e., Pre, 1984–1987, n = 103 males, 73 females). Post30 had greater waist circumference (males: 83.6 ± 9.1 cm vs. 77.8 ± 8.3 cm, females: 77.1 ± 9.7 cm vs. 70.3 ± 5.2 cm, both p < 0.001) and lower estimated maximal aerobic fitness (males: 55 ± 11 vs. 63 ± 7, females: 45 ± 10 vs. 50 ± 7 mLO2/kg/min, both, p < 0.001). Compared to Pre, male Post30 vertical jump (53.6 ± 10.2 vs. 57.0 ± 8.4 cm, p = 0.04) and female Post30 broad jump (178.7 ± 22.1 vs. 186.0 ± 15.5 cm, p < 0.001) were lower. A subsample (n = 65) of Post30 whose habitual activity was assessed, met the aerobic portion of Canadian physical activity guidelines (~400 min/week), but spent excessive amounts of time stationary (10.7 h/day). Current kinesiology students may not be immune to population decreases in physical fitness. Relative to previous group of students interested in movement, fitness was lower in our sample, potentially attributed to excessive stationary time. Regular assessment of physical fitness in kinesiology curriculums may be valuable to understand these declining trends in undergraduate students that mimic population declines in fitness.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 teacher head, 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".