Compliance with physical activity guidelines in a group of UK-based postal workers using an objective monitoring technique

Abstract

Compliance with physical activity (PA) recommendations was assessed using objective PA monitoring of ambulatory activity, in two healthy groups of individuals with active and sedentary occupations. The study showed generally low compliance with the guidelines (53% with 10,000 steps a day; 10% with 30 min of moderate activity a day; and 1% with 30 min of moderate activity a day in bouts of at least 10 min (ACSM)). Adherence to guidelines decreased as more rigorous conditions were applied to the PA data. Use of an objective monitor revealed that health enhancing bouts of activity were performed in periods of approximately 1-min duration, which may be due to unavoidable environmental interruptions. These bouts of activity are much shorter than those advocated in the ACSM guidelines, raising questions regarding how actual behaviour, based on objective monitoring, can be reconciled with guidelines based on self-reported PA.

Habitual Physical Activity in Adults Measured by Accelerometer in Compliance with Selected Health Recommendations

“…The consequences of various basic criteria of physical activity assessment, included in health-oriented recommendations, are quite significant differences in PA evalutaion even in the same study group (percentages of compliance with PA guidelines are unlike). A similar trend was observed in research conducted by Chastin et al (2009), Scheers et al (2013 and Chaix et al (2014) where the degree to which a PA recommendation was satisfied differed depending on the criterion used in the evaluation. There are still only few publications investigating this problem.…”

“…Additionally during the week of monitoring, a vast majority of participants (98%) took an adequate number of steps to fulfill the recommendation by Tudor-Locke et al (2011). The results of authors' own research are pretty optimistic in the light of those demostrated in another researches (Chastin et al, 2009, Bassett, Wyatt, Thompson, Peters, Hill, 2010Hirvensalo et al, 2011;Biernat, 2011;Colley et al, 2011;Pate et al, 2015). The possible reason of that is the fact that our study looked exclusively on members of health promoting associations, who seem to be more physically active than the general population.…”

Different physical activity guidelines and its association with socio-demographic and anthropometric characteristics among working women

“…World-wide previous studies revealed that many factors, such as education, age [22], profession [23] marital status [24] or smoking [3], affect the level of PA. For example, the rate of participation in PA increases proportionally to the level of education [3]. Similarly, lower education is connected with a lower income and results in creating more PA barriers [24].…”

Place of Origin and Place of Residence Versus Level of Physical Activity of Students of the Medical University in Ternopil, Ukraine

“…the beneficial influence of physical activity on human health is widely recognized and tested among international researchers [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. Physical activity should be accepted in a special way among the students as future parents, including mainly among medical faculty students as future doctors and other professions related to health.…”