Poor levels of basic movement skills in Irish children: how to we move past this?
Researchers at DCU....have carried out an all Ireland study of over 2,000 primary school children on the island of Ireland, and have found in addition that one in four cannot run properly and less than one in every five can throw a ball."
From ‘Research to Tackle Movement Deficit in Children’, originally seen on SportForBusiness.
Related, here is the website DCU has for the project, and for anyone with access to research papers, here’s the research paper. I’ll just highlight the final line of the paper:
The findings demonstrate the low levels of Functional Movement Skills proficiency amongst Irish primary school children, the differences between sex that exist, and highlights the need for more programmes that focus on developing these FMS at an early age.
One of the interesting notes from looking at the DCU research is that its partners are….. GAA, Dublin GAA. Both are amazing, however, both are also just a single sport, and team sports only. While the main study looked across at Ireland and primary school children, alarm bells always go off for myself when I see it’s team sports as the sole partners. Here’s the ‘key outputs’ (or recommendations as described on DCU’s site:
The outputs are as follows:
- A school-based intervention with a specific focus on fundamental movement skills (FMS).
The outcomes are as follows:
- Awareness of the importance of sports and exercise for young people
- Change in behaviour towards movement and exercise from the age of six year onwards
- Impact on the organisation and skills development of both coaches and parents at local level.
- Policy change within the GAA on skills development across the country, leading to predicted improved GAA skills and healthier lifestyles across the age groups
This ties in nicely with my notes out of the UK where they are showing increasing participation rates in climbing (and other sports) with over 3% of the population partaking in it. Look at the top sports I mentioned in that previous post. Cycling and running are, by far, the most regular sports: both of which are ‘solo’ sports, not team-based.
It’s 2019 and there’s a range of other sports that while looking like they’re solo, are incredible for participation and social! Once again, referring back to this article with the poor title:
“I’ve gone to the gym loads in the past and I’ve just stopped now. I’ve realised that I just go to the gym, lift some weights and don't talk to anyone. Whereas if I go climbing, I get to have a bunch of people that I’ll meet up with and they cheer me on.”
We’re in the era of community, where you can find any niche you want - online and offline. I’m obviously biased about climbing (it’s my sport/lifestyle for the past twenty-plus years, as well as [disclosure] there’s this great gym I’m involved in), however, what other activities is there where individuals, in particular kids, will want to go and spend the day just hanging out (see the quote above). How to we make sports ‘social’ like the online social networks that are so popular in this era?
Here is why climbing is so good (“People will come on their off day to work, or to hang out with their friends, because of the environment itself,” says Balboni. “It feels really good in there.”), however, there are countless others that come to mind (skateboarding, CrossFit, etc.). From the article ‘Alex Honnold Takes Us into the Great Indoors’:
“I actually kind of hated it at first—it's kind of scary. You have to get used to the heights, obviously,” says Jolie Ruben, 32, a photo editor in New York City who has been climbing for five years. Bored with the regular gym, she was introduced to climbing after her then boyfriend (now husband) caught the bug. “Once you start reaching the top of things, doing a little bit better, you fall in love with it. It was really rewarding having this activity where you're literally holding your own weight.”
“Normally you're in a regular gym and you don't even make eye contact. Everyone's doing their own thing. That was the big difference for me,” she says. Ultimately she converted to climbing's distinct style of camaraderie. “It's one of those things you don't realize until you go through it yourself. When I'm up on the wall and a stranger's cheering me on, I'm not like, ‘That's weird; she doesn't know me.’ I'm like, ‘Oh, that's awesome—that's pushing me to do better.’ ”
In short, I believe there is opportunities outside of just the ‘traditional’ sports that could assist in getting more youth in developing Functional Movement Skills (I can also confirm FMS was written into the Climbing Coaching Awards I helped develop, and is a basic requirement of climbing - you can’t help develop an understanding of your body, movement and balance, by going climbing).
Here’s the societal part that I ponder how to change: there is a strong and increasing cohort of individuals who are into sport. However, there's a huge number of people who just do a sport as an 'experience'. That is, they’ll buy the Groupon or PigsBack voucher for an adventure centre day, or a kite-surfing day, or even a climbing taster, but it’s nothing regular - just something to do for a few hours every once in a while. For kids, there’s also the idea of bringing them to do an ‘activity’ for a birthday party or celebration. But again, not something that is perceived as a regular activity for them. So how do government/policy-makers promote more the idea that these shouldn’t be just ‘events’ and that they should be part of their daily and weekly lifestyle? I’d love to hear your thoughts (comments below, or email me :).
Reference:
Behan, S. et al. (2019) ‘Moving Well-Being Well: Investigating the maturation of fundamental movement skill proficiency across sex in Irish children aged five to twelve’, Journal of Sports Sciences, 37(22), pp. 2604–2612. doi: 10.1080/02640414.2019.1651144.