Ten thousand steps and more. The alerts are multiplying, in France as elsewhere. Two-thirds of young people aged 11 to 17 face a serious health risk, due to the combination of physical inactivity and the level of sedentary lifestyle, in particular the time of exposure to screens, thus alerted the National Health Security Agency (Anses) in an assessment at the end of 2020. Between 1972 and 2011, the cardio-respiratory physical capacity of adolescents would have decreased by 0.5% per year on average, according to studies carried out in different countries.
Concerned about this situation, the Pour une France en forme collective, a group of doctors and experts created in 2019, partner of the Organizing Committee for the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games, decided to conduct a study among thousands of middle school students. The goal: to assess their physical capacity and the effectiveness of an adapted program.
Presented Monday, February 6 at a press conference – in the presence of Amélie Oudéa-Castéra, Minister of Sports and the Olympic and Paralympic Games, and Pap Ndiaye, Minister of National Education and Youth – at the Paul-Bert school in Nogent-sur-Marne (Val-de-Marne), the study, called “Inverting the curves”, was carried out from September to early November 2022 with 9,218 middle school students from 6e aged 10 to 12, in three regions: Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, Hauts-de-France and Brittany.
Decreased cardio-respiratory capacity
To assess cardio-respiratory capacity, the shuttle test was used, specifies Professor François Carré, sports cardiologist at the University Hospital of Rennes, who coordinates this study, financed by the Matmut Foundation, the French Federation of Cardiology and the Ministry of Sports. . The principle is to make the children run between blocks placed every 20 meters by joining the next block at each beep. The student must respect the rhythm of the race, which accelerates by 0.5 kilometers per hour (km/h) approximately every minute. It stops when it is no longer able to follow the rhythm imposed by the famous beep. The objective is to determine the distance traveled in six minutes, the maximum aerobic speed.
First observation: the children tested run slower – at 10.2 km/h (9.9 km/h for girls and 10.4 for boys) – than a population of the same age more than thirty years ago . A study conducted in Bordeaux in 1987 by researcher Georges Cazorla with 388 girls and 342 boys had then evaluated their speed at 11 km/h (10.5 km/h for girls and 11.4 km/h for boys) . Then, 6,321 children were divided into two groups. For six weeks, one took just the standard two-hour weekly PE class; while the other benefited during these sessions from an individualized and split fifteen-minute running training, depending on the result of the initial test.
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