Predictors of Young Adults’ Physical Activity and Sedentary Behavior

Although cardiorespiratory fitness and muscular strength are the strongest predictors of lifespan examined in epidemiologic and experimental research, over 75% of adults in the United States fail to meet national physical activity (PA) guidelines and many live sedentary lifestyles. Identifying predictors of PA and sedentary behavior (SB) may inform public health interventions. This study uses questionnaire and activity monitor data to identify predictors of PA/SB for young adults. Young adults are an underexamined population within the PA/SB literature and research on this topic has yielded inconsistent findings. Participants (n = 216) were about 20 years old, predominantly female (n = 149), and owned a smart watch. The study transpired over 29 days with a pretest and two posttests. We examined 6 predictors: perceived stress, anxiety, depression, somatic pain, meaning in life, and gratitude. Sitting time was significantly negatively correlated with meaning in life, moderate PA, vigorous PA, and exercise satisfaction. Moderate PA and exercise satisfaction were unique predictors of sitting time. Perceived stress and somatic pain were negatively correlated with vigorous PA and steps per week. Sitting was negatively correlated with days of walking. Exercise satisfaction was a unique predictor of vigorous PA and daily steps. We found bidirectional relationship between perceived stress and vigorous PA that was mediated by exercise satisfaction. Our findings indicate that interventions should focus on lowering sitting time and raising exercise satisfaction to promote young adults’ adherence to CDC PA recommendations. The relationship between psychological factors and PA might be largely explained by exercise satisfaction.

 Hello everyone. So exercise. We all know fundamentally that exercise is probably good for us. It might make us lose some weight. It might help us be more energetic throughout the day. It even might make us live longer. So why is it so hard for us to exercise? So. Research shows that cardio respiratory fitness, and muscular strength are the strongest predictors of lifespan in the research.

So this beats cancer risk. This beats smoking risk. This beats type two diabetes. If you can run fast and hard and you can lift heavy, you will likely live for a long time. Despite this, over 75% of adults in the United States fail to meet the national guidelines. So why is this the case? So our question was, what are the mental and physical factors that predict exercise and sitting behavior, especially in young adults?

And the way we attacked this question was we recruited over 200 Mason students who with a mean age of 20 years old, and we required them to wear smartwatch smart watches throughout a 29 day period. And now throughout that period we analyze their sort of different psychological and physical variables through questionnaire data.

And after that study we were able to run data analysis using SPSS.

So what predictors or did we examine in this study? So we examined sort of two classes of predictors that we hypothesized to be either protective or harmful to physical activity. So protective. We have meaning in life. So the sense that someone feels that they can engage purposefully in their day-to-day lives, sort of the antithesis to nihilism.

And now you have gratitude is gratitude can be a state and a trait so people can feel grateful. All of the time. Or they can have moments where they feel gr grateful, which is more of the trait like gratitude. Um, this questionnaire measures both the state and the trait, but it basically means how grateful are you or like how much gratitude do you have for your current situation despite all the negatives.

So it’s sort of like almost an optimistic worldview. We also have several risk factors, so perceived stress. Anxiety, somatic symptoms and depression. Somatic symptoms meaning bodily pain and aches.

So what do we hypothesize?

First things first, we hypothesize that the risk factors, so remember, that’s your perceived stress, anxiety, depression, and body pain. We predicted that that would be. Um, related to less exercise and more sitting. So for example, someone who is very anxious, we expect them to exercise less and sit more. And this is in line with the research.

Um, uh, alternatively, we think that the protective factors, so those are our median life and gratitude will be related to more exercise and less sitting. Finally, we predict that all these factors to both risk and protective factors will uniquely predict exercise in sitting. So that means that out of all the variables that we assessed in our study, we would think that the, all our protective and risk factors accountant for unique variants in our outcomes.

So what we observe. Our relationship between our predictors and outcomes is primarily attributed to our factors instead of some other confounding third variable. So what do we find? So first we found some pretty interesting information about our samples activity. So again, we have about 200 Mason students over 18 years old.

With a mean age of 20 years old, and we found that GMU students surpass Americans in meeting C to C guidelines. So that means that you can see in our figure here that almost 54% of American, or sorry, 54% of GMU students meet or exceed the national guidelines of activity. So the CD. C recommends that people, especially adults, more specifically.

Participate in at least 150 minutes. So two and a half hours of moderate intensity exercise per week, or the equivalent of vigorous activity. And so we found that in our sample over almost 54% of our students met or exceeded these guidelines. Whereas nationally, only 25% of American adults meet those guidelines.

So we’re almost twice as compliant. Compared to the average American, but this can be somewhat misleading because as you can see on our bottom bar here, the sedentary bar, almost 20% of GE students in our sample had zero minutes, zero minutes of activity per week. And so that was a cause for concern.

We found that meaning in life was negatively related to sitting time. So people who perceive that they have a purposeful engagement in their life, that they can traverse the day-to-day events of their life and feel like it has purpose. Those people tended to sit less throughout this 29 day period.

We also found that people who were physically active, especially within the moderate physical activity category, um, this uniquely predicted sitting time up to 29 days after baseline. So basically this was our big longitudinal finding that people who were. Especially active at day one of our study tended to sit less up to almost a month after baseline.

Additionally, we found that perceived stress and somatic pain were negatively related to vigorous activity and daily steps. So people who reported being more stressed and having more bodily pain, typically exercised less and walked less.

So exploratory analysis revealed some interesting results. So especially before examining the relationship between stress and vigorous activity. As you can recall, before we found that stress was negatively related to physical activity, but uh, exploratory analysis revealed that stress was not a unique predictor of vigorous activity, meaning that.

There’s something else accounting for that variance. And what we found was exercise satisfaction accounted for that variance in a bi-directional, fully mediated model. So what does that mean? It means that perceived stress has no relationship, uh, has at least no unique relationship with vigorous activity.

But when you include exercise satisfaction. It has a mediaing relationship so that, so in our first model here in Model A, we found that people who were stressed reported less exercise satisfaction and exercise satisfaction. Being a strong predictor of vigorous activity would increase vigorous activity.

So basically, people who were stressed had less as facts from exercising, and so were less likely to exercise. Additionally, this was bidirectional. So if you flip it on its head, it is also true. So vigorous activity has no unique predictive relationship with perceived stress, but when you add exercise satisfaction, vigorous activity can, is, can be associated with a lot of exercise satisfaction.

And in doing so since exercise satisfaction is, is, um, associated with less perceived stress. It can vigor activity, could then could lead to less perceived stress. I should state that this is cross-sectional data, so we’re not making a causal claim, but we did find a fully mediated cross-sectional model with these variables, some things to take away with you.

So median life is negatively related to setting time. So. If you can find a way to increase your perception of life being purposeful to you, that things aren’t meaningless, that your actions matter. If you can increase that, you may be able to sit less and improve your physical health. Um, being active, especially moderately active, decreases your risk of sitting for chronically amount, chronic amounts of time.

Uh, stress may reduce exercise satisfaction, which in turn would reduce your, um, vigorous physical activity and vigorous activity may raise exercise satisfaction. And finally, satisfaction is weigh in more vigorous activity. Thank you for listening. Have a good day.