Hi. Welcome back to Physical activity Part 2. Today, we're going to be talking a little bit about interventions and identifying various options for boosting physical activity or for reducing physical inactivity. So we spoke or eluded briefly in the last video segment about some of the built environmental factors that can contribute to physical inactivity. So it's important to consider both the individual level and the social level of built environment when trying to develop our interventions. At the individual-level, there are a lot of factors that can negatively affect physical activity. Things like advancing age, illness, chronic disease, socio-economic status, demographics factors including gender, such as that females tend to get less physical activity than people who are male. Lower perceived health status, actual health status or illness or infirmity, overweight and obesity and disability are all associated with lower physical activity. Now to just to give you some bit of indication of the real effects of age, which is a very primary factor influencing physical activity levels. You can see that of the number of kids who are getting adequate amounts of physical activity, and remember, for children, the guidelines are 60 minutes a day. For kids who are 6-11, not even 50 percent of kids are getting adequate levels. We're already seeing a gender effect emerging, even for younger children. Likely as a function of ideas of why young girls might be getting less physical activity than young boys. They don't see as many women in popular culture doing activities compared to men. I don't know, that there's so many more portrayals of male athletes and it's so cultural, I think especially in the United States for boys to be encouraged to do sports and toss the ball with their dad compared to girls. They are already seeing like a social learning and dimension of it and gender roles. I was also thinking about just forms of gendered play. What you talked about with boys going out and like tossing the ball with dad or whatever. Very frequently, girls are doing whatever they're doing, tea parties and doll play, and boys are out there playing with other more active sport. I know that I'm speaking various stereotypically about girl and boy sport. But the research supports this, that there are very clear gender norms unfortunately, even at the primary school level, and not necessarily because kids are drawn differently, they may lead to these types of different behaviors but that they're taught that and go with their similar perceived group more often than not. The girls are frequently doing crafts and the boys are running around being more active. I know what happened to me anyway and a lot of my peers is this is the period when girls hit puberty. So that's when you start to become more self-conscious about your body, and your hips get wider, you start to grow boobs and you're like, ''What's happening to me, I'm not as fast as I used to be?'' That's a huge drop-off in female participation in school sports too, which is too bad. Yeah, it's like the body image interaction. Oh, my gosh, that's huge. How that contributes to discomfort on the playing field or whatever else, and even drawing attention to body and these kinds of things. When it becomes more for, particularly for some forms of women's sport and for male sport too actually when you're seeing one's physical ability or perceived ability, or what's often taught in some forms of sport that one's body shape or weight or musculature predicts their supposed success on the field or in the sport itself. So it's a little bit of a tangent, but since you brought it up and it's highly relevant, I think that you actually see rates of eating disorders escalating in those sports where the perceived success is contingent upon the body shape or weights. So things like gymnastics, swimming, and so on. But it's also applies to male sports. So when you see young boys with eating disorders, it's when they're in these types of sports like wrestling and swimming, where they're experiencing weigh-ins or the coaches or other wisdom for success about the sport is that, you need to cut weight or trim down or build muscle. So anytime you're seeing a kid and an adult in a position where their success and it includes sports success, hinges upon their weight or shape, and then you see the emergence of eating disorders in pretty significant rates. So I'm really glad you brought that up. I think you're exactly right about that. Then this actually continues into adulthood and advancing age. So now we're seeing less of a gender effect in adulthood, but obviously and mostly because we're getting a floor effect, like we're really bottoming out in terms of percent of the population that's attaining the recommended amounts of physical activity. This is with a more objective measure of an accelerometer, not the measures such as self-reports. So self-report is likely we would see higher numbers probably. I believe the data up to about the 40 percent that are supposedly getting enough. But when you actually track it to have more objective level or more objective measure and track that to the objective levels of physical fitness, much lower numbers.
