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TUESDAY, July 15 (HealthDay News) -- By the time children reach their teens, their level of physical activity drops significantly, new research shows.
Kids who were averaging three hours of moderate to vigorous activity when they were 9 barely manage to get more than a half-hour of daily exercise by the time they reach 15, according to a study in the July 16 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
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"Kids' activity is decreasing dramatically between 9 and 15," said study author Dr. Philip Nader, professor emeritus of pediatrics at the University of California at San Diego in La Jolla.
Nader said the reasons for the drop are many.
"There may be competing, more interesting things to do; physical education is being done away with in some places, and so is recess; there aren't as many open spaces or parks, and being outside is one of the main things that keeps people active," he said.
Plus, children don't get the same routine daily activity that youngsters from a generation or two ago did. "Kids used to just run around and ride their bikes everywhere, and kids used to walk to school. Now, parents drive them," Nader noted.
The lack of physical activity is linked to the growing problem of childhood obesity, and most experts recommend that children should be getting at least one hour of moderate to vigorous activity each day, reports the study.
To assess how close children were coming to that goal, Nader and his colleagues followed a group of 1,032 kids beginning in 2000, when the children were 9, until 2006, when they were 15.
Half of the group was male, and almost one-quarter came from low-income families.
At 9, the children engaged in an average of three hours of moderate to vigorous physical activity each day. From that point on, daily exercise dropped an average of 38 minutes per year on weekdays and 41 minutes per year for weekend activity. At 15, teens participated in daily moderate to vigorous activity for an average of 35 minutes on the weekend and 49 minutes on weekdays.
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