Impact of extra curricular physical activity on body characteristics, motor abilities and physical habits in 7-9 year old children

Sedentary lifestyle is the problem of modern lifestyle. There is less spontaneous movement and more passive free time activities. This leads to negative consequences, e.g. body weight gain and obesity, which are two of the most significant factors of many modern time diseases. Unfortunately, these trends have already been found in children, therefore it is essential how much attention is paid to encouraging children to get active and providing an encouraging environment and circumstances that enable active leisure activities. The theoretical part presents professional findings in this area. An important purpose of a conscious society, mostly parents and teachers, is to provide children with adequate everyday physical activities and limit negative effects of modern lifestyle. Despite the declarative awareness of the importance and role of healthy lifestyle, there is still a lack of additional sports activities, and the trend of medical conditions is still increasing. This indicates that the interventions are either not intensive enough or offered to children in an unsuitable way which the children do not accept. One of the options that schools can provide are extra-curricular sports activities during after-school extended time. These activities are intended to enrich regular PE lessons, to present different sports activities to children and get them used to active leisure time. Our starting research question is: Do chosen additional interventions have effect on physical characteristics and development of motor abilities of children and to what extent? In our research we investigated the influence of extra curricular sports activities. To do this, we organized a one-year longitudinal research, during which one group experienced sports intervention. The experimental group was given additional three hours of physical activities weekly and the control group was not. We performed testing of motor abilities and physical habits at the beginning and end of the experimental period. After the period of one year, we valued the efficiency of chosen intervention regarding motor abilities and body characteristics of children. The intervention influenced the total amount of physical activities in experimental group. We found out that active spending of after-school additional time did not change body characteristics and most of motor abilities, except for 6.4% prevention of flexibility loss. In regard to physical habits in the experimental group there was an increase of total daily physical activity (11%), in time of moderate (33%) and vigorous intensive physical activity (88%) and decrease of physical inactivity (3%). Under the influence of chosen intervention the children spent 46% more time in moderate to vigorous physical activity. Overall physical/sports activity increased by 16%. We can conclude that the chosen intervention can change physical habits, but the period of time was probably too short to show effects on body characteristics and motor abilities. These are in this age group under very intensive influence of growth and maturity