Promoting Cardiorespiratory Fitness in Young People: The Importance of the School Context

Abstract

The ability to deliver oxygen to the skeletal muscles and use it to generate energy to support muscle activity is known as cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF). Because of its importance to health, young people’s declining CRF is a cause of concern. Therefore, promoting CRF through physical activity (PA) participation is needed. Among young people, the school setting has been proposed as a privileged context to promote PA and CRF, and school-based PA interventions are known to improve PA and CRF. Nevertheless, school-based PA interventions are not universal and may not be sustainable over long periods if the mobilized resources are not sustained. There is a need to promote sustainable health promotion actions to maintain their benefits beyond the initial stage of implementation and deliver within the limits of the available resources. One way of doing so is through physical education (PE). PE is part of the curriculum in most countries, allows children and adolescents to engage in PA, and is supervised by trained PE teachers. The school is a privileged context for health promotion actions through its regular implementation across most education years. This chapter advocates PE as a privileged setting for promoting PA and CRF.