The new normal and level of physical activity and sedentary lifestyles in college students

Abstract

The objective was to determine the impact of the pandemic and the prevalence of physical activity levels and sedentary lifestyles in medical students at the University of Guayaquil during the COVID-19 pandemic confinement. The study included 355 medical students enrolled at the Faculty of Medical Sciences of the University of Guayaquil (107 males - 248 females). The International Physical Activity Questionnaire (IPAQ) was used and the criteria of Patterson et al (2018) were applied to identify sedentary behaviour. The non-parametric Mann Whitney Wilcoxon U test was used for group comparison. The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic manifests itself with prevalences of 68.3% inactive subjects and 31.7% active people. Sedentary students (62.2%) prevailed over non-sedentary subjects (37.8%), with significant differences by sex (p-value: ≤ 0.05) validated by effect size and statistical power. The levels of PA and sedentary lifestyles exceed the global estimates of the World Health Organization, making it necessary to adopt university health policies aimed at mitigating the pandemic of physical inactivity.
Keywords: Physical activity, COVID-19, sedentary lifestyle, new normality, effects of social distancing.