Atividade física no contexto de escolares do ensino médio do estado do Rio Grande do Sul

Abstract

Health and the adoption of healthy habits are topics highly discussed nowadays. The school beeing a space of knowledge production, is the ideal place for children and adolescents to acquire good health habits that may be maintained throughout life. The objective of this study was to verify if the knowledge about the physical exercise benefits for health promotion affects the physical activity level (PAL) of high school students from public schools of the State of Rio Grande do Sul, as well as to associate the PAL with perceived barriers. The studied sample had 851 students from the state public network. For the collection of information regarding the PAL, the International Activity Questionnaire (IPAQ), short version, was used. To verify the knowledge of the benefits of physical exercise for health promotion, a questionnaire validated for the Brazilian students was used. For the identification of perceived barriers for physical activity, the instrument proposed by Santos et al. (2010), composed of 12 questions, was used. Descriptive statistics were performed for the data analysis and the data distribuition was tested with the Kruskal-Wallis test. For the comparison of parametric continuous variables between groups, the two-tailed independent samples Z test was used, whereas the Kolmogorov-Smirnov Z test was used for non-parametric variables. The chi-square test was used for the comparisons of categorical variables. For the association analysis between PAL and the number of perceived barriers, the Spearman correlation test was used. The level of significance was 5% in all tests. No statistically significant differences were found in the PAL between the group that had knowledge about the role of physical activity in health and the group that did not have this knowledge (p = 0.380). The most mentioned barriers were: lack of company (59.22%), not having places close to home with physical activity (48.17%) and climate (47.47%). The analysis of the results showed that there is an association between the PAL and the PB (p = 0.000) and that it is inversely proportional (r = -.222). It was concluded that the fact of having greater or lesser knowledge about the benefits of physical activity is not related to the PAL, most of the students are insufficiently active and that the greater the number of perceived barriers for physical activity the lower tends to be the PAL OF high school students from the state education network of Rio Grande do Sul.