Physical education program boosts girls' fitness

By Anne Harding

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Taking physical education (PE) class every school day for a full year improves high school girls' cardiovascular fitness, a new study shows.

But daily PE class has become a rarity at US schools, Dr. Deborah Rohm Young of the University of Maryland in College Park, the study's lead author, told Reuters Health. "More and more schools are getting rid of it," she said, noting that many require just a year or a single semester of PE throughout the four years of high school.

Young and her team tested a life-skills based approach to PE in a group of ninth-graders, which involved instructing kids on problem-solving skills and other techniques to help them add more physical activity to their lives. Classes themselves were designed so the girls spent more time being active, and less time standing in line waiting for a turn.

The researchers randomly assigned 221 girls at a Baltimore school to the life-skills based class or a standard PE class. Girls spent 30.5 percent of the regular class in moderate to vigorous activity, compared with nearly half of the time in the special class.

After eight months, both groups showed significant improvements in cardiorespiratory fitness, according to the report, published in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. They also showed improvements in waist-hip ratio, blood pressure, and HDL or "good" cholesterol levels.

The percentage of girls who spent three hours a day watching TV dropped from 22.3 percent to 17.0 percent for those in the life-skills class, but did not change for the girls who attended the standard gym class.

Young noted that the life-skills approach is considered the state-of-the-art for physical education instruction, although it is still not widely used. "There seems to be a disconnect in how some teachers are trained in that model," she said. "We're seeing that it can be effective in increasing physical activity among these kids, but the message is not getting back to all the teacher training...programs to make that a focus."

SOURCE: Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, December 2006.