School-based program keeps girls active after class

A school-based program designed to increase high-school girls’ physical activity levels may have benefits that extend beyond school hours, new study findings show.

Girls who participated in the school-based intervention were more likely to report engaging in vigorous physical activity in the months after the program ended than were girls who did not participate in the intervention.

“Schools can make a real difference in the overall physical activity levels of their students,” study author Dr. Russell R. Pate, of the University of South Carolina, Columbia, told Reuters Health.

This is the first study to show that a school-based program that focuses on high school girls—who consistently have lower rates of physical activity than do their male peers—and cultivates a school environment that supports the girls’ efforts to be more active, can have such an effect.

Pate and his team conducted their study among 2,744 girls at 24 high schools in South Carolina. Twelve schools were assigned to the intervention, the Lifestyle Education for Activity Program (LEAP), which was designed to increase girls’ physical activity, enhance their enjoyment of that activity and to teach them the skills required to maintain an active lifestyle. The remaining 12 schools were assigned to a comparison group.

During the study period, which lasted one academic year, girls in the intervention schools participated in health education classes as well as a physical education component that included gender-specific, and often gender-separate, activities such as aerobic, dance and self-defense, in addition to traditional PE activities.

At follow-up, about 45 percent of girls in the intervention schools said they had participated in one or more half-hour blocks of vigorous physical activity per day during the previous three days, the researchers report in the American Journal of Public Health. The same was true of 36 percent of girls from the comparison schools.

Girls who participated in a physical education class during ninth grade, as well as 80 percent of girls in both the intervention and comparison groups, were also more likely to report engaging in vigorous physical activity than those who had not participated in PE. However, girls in the intervention group reported participating in higher levels of physical activity during PE classes than did those in the comparison group.

Yet, findings show, the success of the intervention was not solely due to the girls’ participation in PE classes. In fact, girls in the intervention group who had not participated in PE classes also reported more regular vigorous physical activity than did their peers, the report indicates.

“We think girls in the intervention schools were more active because they received a high level of social support for being physically active and because they experienced enjoyment and success in the program,” Pate said.

The intervention did not appear to have any effect on the rates of overweight and Obesity, however, since the percentage of girls identified as overweight or at risk for overweight was similar between the two groups at follow-up, the report indicates.

The reason for this is unknown, but the authors speculate that the overweight girls may have needed to participate in much more physical activity than the intervention provided for them to lose weight. Still, note Pate and his team, the intervention may have decreased the incidence of any new cases of overweight.

“If the LEAP intervention was implemented by high schools across the country, an additional half million 9th grade girls would be vigorously active,” Pate told Reuters Health. “The program can be implemented without a large infusion of money and hence schools could adopt the program without new resources.”

SOURCE: American Journal of Public Health, September 2005.

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