It may seem incredible if we consider that elite athletes do nothing but pulverize records, but it seems that the children of now are slower running than we. Well, not that we are now, but slower than we were when we were children.
A recent study has concluded that if the average child of 1975 made a one-mile (1.6 km) run against the average child now the one in the seventies would reach the goal a minute and a half before the current child. If we explain it in aerobic capacity, children now have a capacity 15% lower to the one we had in our childhood. The causes? You can imagine them.
Study Data
The study data were presented a few days ago at the annual meeting of the American Heart Association in Dallas, and are preliminary, since the study has not yet been published.
To arrive at this data, researchers have analyzed 50 studies on running fitness since 1964, comparing more than 25 million children from 28 different countries between the ages of 9 and 17.
In these studies, cardiac resistance was measured by analyzing the distance children could travel in a given time, or by measuring the time it took to travel a specific distance. These tests lasted between 5 and 15 minutes or, when they were away, they had a distance of between half a mile and two miles (0.8 and 3.2 km).
The researchers saw that, as the years have passed children's resistance has been decreasing in both boys and girls, something that has happened in all the countries analyzed.
What are the causes?
I will comment, although I think it is not necessary to be too smart to know what they are. Children now are slower than we were, and have a lower aerobic capacity because:
- In general weigh more. There is more overweight, more obesity, and that makes you less light.
- Children now they walk less than us Before you went everywhere walking. Now we take them everywhere by car.
- The children now play more alone, and the screens have given ground to group play. Before we spent the day in the streets.
- The food now is not as before. Many children eat a more unbalanced diet than ours, and despite eating more, they have more nutritional deficiencies.
- The environment is not the same. The air we breathed as children was healthier than today.
- There are schools that consider the subject of physical education as secondary, without importance. If they don't move at school and don't move at home, we're going wrong.
Knowing the problems, we know the solutions
The problem is not that children now run less than we did. That is nothing more than the reflection of the real problem: children now have worse physical condition that we as children, and that can lead to health problems in the future. Children have to exercise, not in a mandatory way in 30 minutes daily plan and then shower, but play moving. Walk again, go to school on foot, play in the street, in the parks, take the bike, go on the weekend to the mountain instead of going for a walk in a mall ... I don't know, change a little in general the lifestyle to be all more active, they and us, since we are their example and we are their parents, and of course, if we do not leave home if it is not by car, they will not do it either.
