A new study, done by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and Graduate School of Public Health found that teenage girls in Pittsburgh fall far behind the expected levels of physical activity for U.S. adolescent females.
The Pittsburgh Girls Study has been following girls in 89 Pittsburgh zip codes since 1999.
The goal was to collect information on how many steps girls enrolled in the Pittsburgh Girls Study took on a regular basis. Step counts were measured once a year from 2010 to 2013 using a pedometer. Activity data was reported on over 900 girls who were 14 to 17 years old when the pedometer study started.
Initially, on average, the girls took 5,614 steps per day with very little change in step counts over the four-year period. Typically, 10,000 steps per day is recommended as a daily minimum for girls this age. This level of activity should allow girls to meet the goal of 60 minutes per day of physical activity recommended for youth by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization
In the Pittsburgh study, girls who identified as non-Hispanic African-American averaged slightly more steps than their counterparts. Markers of poverty and poorer neighborhood environment also tended to be associated with slightly higher step counts in this population. Based on previous studies in urban populations, this counter-intuitive relationship between poverty status and activity could be due, in part, to the necessity of walking for transportation. However, it should be noted that, overall, activity levels are low for the majority of girls in the study, regardless of race, ethnicity or poverty.
The analysis also found that average steps per hour peaked near the start of the school day, from 8 to 9 a.m., and again in the late afternoon, from 4 to 5 p.m. And, more steps overall were accrued during school hours, from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., than other periods of the day.