Patterns of physical activity among the students of an Indian university and their perceptions about the curricular content concerned with health

Abstract

BackgroundUniversity students are at risk of losing their focus on maintaining healthy levels of physical activity because of their engagements with curricular and co-curricular activities. In India, the physical activity levels of adult population have been reported to be declining in the recent years. However, large studies focusing on university students pertaining to their physical activity are not there in Indian context. ‘Do the curricula in higher education promote physical activity?’ is another question that has not been addressed well.ObjectivesOur work aims at describing the physical activity levels of the students in a large public-funded central university located in northern India. The study also aims at capturing the student perceptions about the emphasis their curricular activities receive in connection with leading a physically active lifestyle.MethodsThis is a cross-sectional descriptive study and uses International Physical Activity Questionnaire (IPAQ-Long form) to record physical activity among 4586 students. Stratified sampling method was used to enroll the students from each stream (faculty). About 15% of all enrolled students from each faculty were included in the study. The study was conducted in between 2016 and 2019. To capture the student perceptions, we have used a 5-item newly developed scale.Results2828 (61.7%) male and 1758 (38.3%) female students participated in the study. The mean age of our sample was 22.34 ± 3.12 years. Our results indicate that about 14.5% of all students in the study fall under ‘Inactive’ category. Further, the perception about the curricular content pertaining to physical activity varied widely between the students of different streams.DiscussionOur sample reported a better physical activity pattern in comparison to the reported overall physical activity levels of adult population of India. Our results also suggest that health-related topics are inadequately represented in many of the streams of higher education in the university.