2011 Streak 97/365: Walk - 4miles, Time - 1hr 15min, Weather - sunny and warm, later some cloud cover
Today's photo is the latest in season monitoring series (I wonder if Spring Watch would be a good name?). It shows an apple bud almost on the point of blossoming.
My last post talked about the difficulty of getting people to change their ways and walk and cycle more. If it could be done it could be an effective way of increasing the general level of activity in the population and in so doing improve the general health. Exercise with a purpose is more likely to be done than when it is end in itself, needing special dress and equipment.
Getting more people to be more active is the responsibility of the Department of Health but of course walkability and cyclability is Transport and government departments are traditionally very protective of their own patch. I therefore wonder if this area of policy has enough clout.
However general activity only one aspect, more formal exercise whether it be team sport, gym or endurance events, is also important and is the responsibility Sport England. Getting people fitter by encouraging more people to participate in sport more regularly is a worthy policy aim. Like all behaviour change it is difficult and probably needs an empirical approach i.e try something, gather evidence, amend or try something different, monitor, try again, etc,etc.
What it doesn't need is a complete change of direction every so often. This interview with Jeremy Hunt is therefore worrying because he says he is going to scrap the target of trying to encourage a million more people to engage in sport and abandon trying to get the middle aged engaged.Instead the focus will be on younger people in the hope that they will develop lifelong habits.
Hmm the problem with that is that early sporting habits can easily be disrupted by moving, work, and babies. Getting back afterwards is often a major hurdle.
The reason given for the change is that progress in increasing sports participation is too slow, as the results of Sport England's Active People Survey show. But this is where it gets interesting as this letter to the Guardian shows:
There is something very odd about the statistics on sports participation. You quote the Active People survey but do not mention the Taking Part survey, also funded by Sport England and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. Even more strange is that Sport England does not have any information on the Taking Part survey on its website. Could this be because Taking Part shows a very different picture? This survey shows an increase in 3x30min participation per week of 1.5 million since 2007-08 (compared with next to no increase shown by the Active People survey). A remarkable increase if true and, who knows, maybe due in part to the money invested by the previous government.
So which survey is correct? Taking Part uses a proper randomised, stratified sample of households visited by trained interviewers. Active People uses random digit dialling of landlines with phone interview. Random dialling of landlines does not sample much of the population who now use mobile phones. Also this profile is rapidly changing. I believe the Taking Part data is accurate, which brings us back to an interesting question. Why is Sport England so embarrassed by its success? Cuddling up to the new coalition government, perhaps?
Bruce Lynn
Emeritus professor of physiology, University College London
The Taking Part report is here and I will be looking at it more closely later but such confusion makes it difficult to understand what is happening with our public exercise policy.
No comments:
Post a Comment