Abstract
In Slovenia, the national SLOfit surveillance system of the somatic and motor development of children and youth has been enabling researchers to observe the developmental trends of the entire population of school-aged children since 1987. The national database currently incorporates over 7.2 million sets of measurements of eight fitness tests and three anthropometric measurements. Since 1991, as in the rest of the world, in Slovenia, there is a common perception that the physical fitness of contemporary children is in decline and below the level of the physical fitness of the previous generation's childhood fitness. Our paper examines the trends of physical fitness in 26 birth cohorts of 7–10-year-olds. The analysis shows that the secular trends of physical fitness in boys and especially in girls have been positive and that the level of physical fitness of recent birth cohorts exceeds the national average of physical fitness of the 1989–2019 period. At the same time, the analysis reveals that the distribution of physical fitness has been changing from almost normal in the cohorts born in the first half of the 1980s, toward positively skewed in the subsequent cohorts born before the year 2000, and bimodal distribution in the later cohorts, indicating growing inequality and polarization of the motor development of children.
Highlights
There is a common perception that the physical fitness of children has declined over the last few generations due to growing sedentary behavior, lack of habitual physical activity, and the easy availability of energy-rich food
The 2000 birth cohort in boys experienced the poorest development of physical fitness while the first cohort that again exceeded the average national Physical Fitness Index (PFI) of the 1989–2019 period was the 2004 birth cohort
We were unable to identify any other study that compared the secular trends of general physical fitness between different generations, the findings of our study show the opposite trends than the majority of recent studies of secular and temporal trends from other countries [4, 5, 7,8,9,10,11, 13, 18, 21]
Summary
There is a common perception that the physical fitness of children has declined over the last few generations due to growing sedentary behavior, lack of habitual physical activity, and the easy availability of energy-rich food. This perception, is based on a great deal of anecdotal and lay speculation since the evidence, deriving from longitudinal cohort studies of secular trends in physical fitness is scarce and the existing evidence inconclusive. Unable to identify any study of secular trends in physical fitness that addressed the problem of secular changes in its distribution; this is mainly due to a lack of national monitoring systems for the development of physical fitness that could regularly provide population data or at least nationally representative large datasets on the annual level
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