Effectiveness of intervention on physical activity of children (2012)

Objective: To determine whether, and to what extent, physical activity interventions affect the overall activity levels of children.

Design: Systematic review and meta-analysis.

Results: Thirty studies (involving 14.326 participants; 6.153 with accelerometer measured physical activity) met the inclusion criteria and all were eligible for meta-analysis/meta-regression. The pooled intervention effect across all studies was small to negligible for total physical activity and small for moderate or vigorous activity. Meta-regression indicated that the pooled intervention effect did not differ significantly between any of the subgroups.

Conclusions: This review provides strong evidence that physical activity interventions have had only a small effect (approximately 4 minutes more walking or running per day) on children’s overall activity levels. This finding may explain, in part, why such interventions have had limited success in reducing the body mass index or body fat of children.