Objective Determination of Physical Activity Levels in Mexican Youngsters

Introduction In México, despite the important issue of obesity and overweight, little is known regarding the relationship of physical activity and their related health issues, especially in the adolescent population

Purpose To evaluate in a group of sophomore high school students the amount of physical activity measured by accelerometry and podometry.

Methods A representative number of male and female students beginning high school, aged 15 to 19 years, from 6 different high schools from the metropolitan area of Guadalajara and 5 regional high schools in the State of Jalisco, all from the University of Guadalajara, were evaluated for physical activity using accelerometers Actigraph GT3X+, for 7 days including night sleep, podometry was also evaluated using the same apparatus.

Results In table 1, are summarized the results for the accelerometer evaluation. These first results are very discouraging since it is clear that our youngsters are far away from what is minimally expected from them.

Conclusions Because we could not find reports on objective measurement of physical activity for Mexican adolescent population, these results partially confirm the general impression that our population is not achieving the minimal recommendations for physical activity, something that has to be confirmed in order to develop health preventive programs based on physical activity and education. Another point that attracts our attention is that these negative results are similar for boys and girls and we don´t find differences between the populations in the metropolitan area than that in smaller cities of the State of Jalisco.