Document Type

Article

Publication Date

3-28-2025

Identifier

DOI: 10.1186/s12889-025-22442-8; PMCID: PMC11954351

Abstract

PURPOSE: Youth living in rural areas have higher risk for overweight/obesity. It is important to understand where these children engage in moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) and sedentary time to encourage or intervene on activity in specific locations. This study compared MVPA and sedentary time across locations among children with overweight/obesity in the rural Midwest of the U.S.

METHODS: Participants wore an accelerometer and Global Positioning System tracker over 7-days to collect data on MVPA, sedentary time, and location. Locations were categorized as Home, Home Neighborhood, School, School Neighborhood, and 'Other'. Differences based on school and non-school days were examined.

RESULTS: Participants (n = 44; 8.8 ± 0.8 years; 61.4% females) engaged in an average of 41.4 min of MVPA/day and 6.7 h of sedentary time/day. In total, most MVPA was obtained at School (18.2 min/day, 44.2% of total MVPA), followed by Other (22.7%) and Home (20.5%). Participants accrued most of their sedentary time at School (141.7 min/day, 35.3%) followed by Home (31.2%) and Other locations (20.3%). Relative to time spent in location, participants were least active in their School Neighborhood (3.7% of time was in MVPA) and most active in Other locations (7.0%). When comparing non-school and school days, participants obtained 95.7 more minutes sedentary time at Home and were in Other locations for almost 2.5 more hours more on non-school days than school days. During school days, participants obtained 25.0 min/day of MVPA at school.

CONCLUSION: The School location is supportive of MVPA and high amounts of sedentary time. In addition to supporting children to travel to locations where they are likely to be active, efforts are needed to increase activity in locations where children spend substantial time. Providing more opportunities for activity in/around the home and reducing sedentary time during school may be promising targets for improving health among rural children.

Journal Title

BMC public health [electronic resource]

Volume

25

Issue

1

First Page

1188

Last Page

1188

MeSH Keywords

Humans; Child; Female; Male; Cross-Sectional Studies; Exercise; Rural Population; Sedentary Behavior; Accelerometry; Residence Characteristics; Geographic Information Systems; Pediatric Obesity; Midwestern United States

PubMed ID

40155954

Keywords

ArcGIS; GPS; Home; MVPA; Obesity; School; Trips; Youth

Comments

Grants and funding

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.

Publisher's Link: https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-025-22442-8

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