Shifting Trajectories: Being Active as Adults Starts with Being Active in Youth

Inactivity that starts in youth sometimes stays for life. Here’s how we can support changing that.

After high schoolers take gym class for the last time many of them stop exercising all together. 

This doesn’t happen because they don’t know how to exercise; it happens because they haven’t built the capacity they need to increase their self-efficacy. 

Self-efficacy refers to “the belief we have in our own abilities, specifically our ability to meet the challenges ahead of us and complete a task successfully.” Or, in this case, one’s belief in their ability to exercise confidently and competently.

The relationship each of us develops with healthy lifestyles is cemented in school years. An alarming fact when you consider more than 80 per cent of Canadians aged 5-17 don’t meet physical activity guidelines.

Shifting Trajectories

Many of these people will want to get off this trajectory as they age and lifestyle-modifiable disease burdens come knocking. Yet, most will struggle to build healthy habits.

Why is that? Simply put, our youth are coming out of school and entering adulthood with very low self-efficacy for doing and scheduling activity. 

Our school system delivers physical education in pre-scheduled time slots where students experience little autonomy and self-direction.

Students do learn important skills in this setting, such as running or how to play team sports, but they do so without building the scheduling self-efficacy they need to initiate these kinds of activities on their own.

What we need to facilitate for our youth - and the responsibility for this doesn’t fall squarely on schools - is more free play and unstructured activity with their peers.

I believe everyone agrees that we want our youth to graduate from high school as young adults who have agency and ownership over their health. To accomplish this we need to provide them with the skills to manage their own health and activity levels.

The remarkable thing about youth is how receptive they are to behavioural changes. This is where our opportunity lies; this is how we change the trajectory that the majority of our population is on.

Because our behaviours and tendencies cement as we age, the highest chance we have to be active adults is to establish ownership and self-efficacy over our health when we are young.

The Foundation of Active Lives

We can lay the foundation for this during school years, something we’ve already been able to do with GoGetFit.

In a pilot project at a large academic high school in Edmonton, Alberta, three cohorts of Grade 10 students started using our app to log and schedule activity.

Through their teachers, along with a little input from weekly expert-curated articles from the GoGetFit team, students learned about different types of activity and that things like mowing the lawn count towards their movement goals.

What they scheduled for themselves was completely up to them. If they preferred to dance, run, shoot hoops, or help their grandparents with the gardening that all added up in their logged activity levels. 

Successful habit formation requires support, accountability, and autonomy. We start to establish autonomy as soon as GoGetFit users choose and schedule their activities.

Accountability is reinforced firstly through a commitment each person makes to themselves when they join GoGetFit, outlining why they want to be active and healthy. And secondly, through the connection to their healthcare provider, or teachers, in this case, through the GoGetFit Pro Portal.

Though the student must be the architect of their lifestyle, for most of them to be successful, they need support to get there. This might be in the form of encouragement, resources, suggestions, or reassurances.

No matter what the students needed, their teachers could provide it to them instantly, on the group or individual level, through the Pro Portal.

To have a truly meaningful impact, lifestyle intervention work and transformations must take place at home and in daily life. Through this platform, teachers finally had a way to support students outside of the classroom as they pursued self-initiated, self-directed change.

Being Active in Youth

By establishing healthy habits in their teens, we can keep the next generation off the trajectory of continually increasing lifestyle-modifiable disease burdens. 

Loss of independence and increased mortality and morbidity are straining our healthcare system and our economy much more than they should be. Blame for this doesn’t lie squarely on the shoulders of screens and digital technology.

In fact, we can leverage technology to buck the trend. With GoGetFit, we’re able to bring 24 behavioural change techniques to the masses, empowering them to add years to their lives by adding life to their years.

The platform isn’t designed for the 20-or-so per cent of us who are already active. It’s designed for everybody else.

And the goal isn’t just to get people moving. The goal is for people to feel healthier, be more productive, sleep better, experience less stress and anxiety, and get more out of every single day. This is something that anyone can experience by getting active.

What it comes down to is changing our relationship with movement. Activity isn’t an inconvenience we don’t have time for. Rather it’s something that enhances our lives.

If we can achieve this, the farthest spot in the parking lot no longer looks like an inconvenience. It looks like an opportunity.