Reliability and Validity of the FITNESSGRAM®: Quality of Teacher-Collected Health-Related Fitness Surveillance Data

Systematic review to identify and appraise outcome measures used to evaluate childhood obesity treatment interventions (CoOR): evidence of purpose, application, validity, reliability and sensitivity

“…A total of 14 manuscripts [136][137][138][139][140][141][142][143][144][145][146][147][148][149] were identified that described 13 fitness outcome measures. A summary of the data extracted for these studies is provided in Appendix 11.…”

Physical Fitness Evaluation of School Children in Southern Italy: A Cross Sectional Evaluation

“…Successful examples are the Assessing Levels of Physical Activity study (ALPHA study) [8], which aimed to identify reliable fitness tests for children and adolescents; the AVENA study, which aimed to evaluate cardiovascular fitness in youth around Europe [9]; the Healthy Lifestyle in Europe by Nutrition in Adolescence study (the HELENA study) [10], which evaluated physical fitness over 10 European nations; FitnessGram [11], whose purpose was to increase the levels of physical activity in children in the United States; and EUROFIT [12], a program in Europe. All these attempts firstly detected the reliability of the fitness tests for specific populations and secondly provided age-related fitness percentile values [13,14].…”

“…These tests were the standing broad jump for the evaluation of lower limb strength, the hand-grip test for the evaluation of the strength of the upper limbs, the sit-up to exhaustion for the evaluation of abdominal muscular endurance, the 4 × 10-m shuttle run for the evaluation of agility, and the 20-m shuttle run test for the evaluation of aerobic capacity. Notwithstanding that such a fitness battery was used in adolescents, other studies such as AVENA, FitnessGram, or EUROFIT, have used similar fitness batteries to evaluate physical fitness levels in children [11,12,16,17]. Another similar battery is that proposed by the PREFIT study used in Spanish schoolchildren [18].…”

Fitness Testing for Children: Let’s Mount the Zebra!

“…More problematic still is the ongoing scientific debate over various technical issues related to accelerometry, such as appropriate choice of manufacturer and model, epoch length, inclusion criteria for what constitutes a valid file, and ultimately what accelerometry count cut-points offer meaningful interpretation and information on PA. 61 In contrast, the feasibility and reliability of standardized large scale and school-based fitness assessment by teachers or other trained individuals is well documented in the UK and internationally. 3,24,62,63 Importantly, while fitness and PA are independently associated with health, 12,64 studies in adults 65 and children 54 suggest that fitness is more strongly associated with cardio-metabolic risk than is PA. Given these health-associations, we argue that any cross-sectional, longitudinal or secular assessments of youth health should include a measure of CRF as well as at least 1 component of muscular fitness.…”