Public health and clinical recommendations for physical activity and physical fitness - Special focus on overweight youth

Numerous physical activity and physical fitness recommendations exist for youth. To date, however, no investigator has systematically reviewed these public health and clinical guidelines to determine whether the recommendations address overweight youth. This review examines youth-oriented physical activity and physical fitness recommendations for both the public health community and the clinical community, and assesses how overweight youth are specifically targeted by each of these two groups. Our review determined the extent to which the recommendations assessed four components of physical activity (i.e. frequency, intensity, duration and type) and four components of physical fitness (i.e. cardiorespiratory capacity, strength, flexibility and body composition). We further reviewed clinical recommendations to determine how they included two facets of the physician-patient encounter: assessment and counselling. After identifying all current physical activity and physical fitness recommendations for youth, we evaluated whether public health (n = 13) and clinical recommendations (n = 12) addressed physical activity and physical fitness for overweight youth. Findings revealed inconsistent, yet explicit, recommendations for the public health community where most organisations (12 of 13, 92%) included 3 physical activity components. In addition, organisations encouraged volumes of daily moderate- to vigorous-intensity physical activity for youth ranging from 30-60 or more minutes. Recommendations for the clinical community generally did not provide explicit physical activity and fitness recommendations to advise physicians on the assessment and counselling of patients and their families. Overweight youth were addressed within some recommendations (6 of 12, 50%) for the clinical community, but within few recommendations (2 of 13, 15%) for the public health community. To best inform public health and clinical communities, organisations developing future recommendations should include information fully documenting the decision-making processes used to develop the recommendations. In cases where mutual goals exist, public health and clinical communities should consider collaborating across agencies to develop joint recommendations.