This study explored the prevalence and trends of adolescents' outdoor physical activity (PA) to determine whether the agreement between preferred PA and PA actually undertaken was associated with higher odds for meeting PA recommendations and achieving a higher level of well-being. The study was based on an understanding that health-promoting physical activities performed outdoors could contribute to a healthy lifestyle for adolescents and that outdoor physical activities (“green exercise”) provide significantly higher well-being benefits than PA in other environments.
This study was conducted in Poland and the Czech Republic with 10,086 adolescents participating in the first phase of the project. This phase involved an assessment of the adolescents' PA preferences using an online standardized questionnaire divided into eight different categories of PA: individual PA, team PA, fitness-related PA, water-based PA, outdoor PA, martial arts, rhythm and dance PA, and overall PA. Participants selected their top preferred PA from the list or mentioned a PA of a similar type. The participants also provided information about their participation in organized PA over the period of a year, the number of hours per week they spent in the given PA, and their most frequently performed PA during the summer and winter.
Over two thousand of the first-phase participants also completed the International Physical Activity Questionnaire and the World Health Organization W-5 questionnaire to assess well-being. Over 1000 of these respondents then participated in objective PA monitoring using pedometers. A synthesis of this data allowed the researchers to assess whether the agreement between preferred PA and PA actually undertaken was associated with higher chances of meeting PA recommendations and achieving a higher level of well-being.
Findings indicated that adolescents showing agreement between preferred PA and activities actually performed met the recommendation for vigorous PA more often and reported higher levels of well-being than those who did not show this agreement. Additionally, the natural environment was found to be a stimulating factor for adolescents meeting the recommended level of PA. There were some gender differences in preferred activities; boys preferred cycling, swimming and downhill skiing and girls preferred swimming, skating, and cycling, with skating and skiing being the activities most likely to show gender differences. These preferences tended to remain stable over time.
These findings indicate that evaluating outdoor PA preferences and taking the preferred activities into account may be an efficient and effective way of promoting the physical and mental health of adolescents. This research also suggests that the ability to perform PA in the natural environment could be a key factor in reducing the negative impact of decreasing levels of PA.
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