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Be fit, get into SLOfit

SLOfit is a national surveillance system for physical and motor development of children and youth which was formerly known as Sports Educational Chart. The system was implemented in 1982 on a sample of Slovenian schools and after 5 years of testing it was introduced to all Slovenian primary and secondary schools.

Every year all primary and secondary schools in Slovenia participate in SLOfit and we have introduced it also to the university student population.

With the help of the SLOfit data children, youth and their parents can monitor their physical and motor development, while teachers and physicians acquire important information necessary for the planning and implementation of intervention in the cases when children experience difficulties in their physical and motor development or professional guidance when children show extraordinary abilities.

SLOfit diagram

In the narrow sense SLOfit includes:

  • annual systematic measurements of children with 11 measurements every April
  • sending the data of those children whose parents or themselves (in the case of secondary-school students), give active consent for their data to be included in the SLOfit database to the Faculty of Sport, where the data is cleaned and analysed in a couple of days and feedback reports for individual children and classes sent back to schools,
  • feedback information on every child’s development and physical fitness (personal SLOfit chart) which includes raw data of all the measurements as well as standardised values which enable direct comparison of a child’s current status with previous data and with population data, as well as the evaluation of their health risks (currently available only to children included in the Enjoy Health project and university students, include in the SLOfit Student project).

SLOfit facts

  • annual monitoring since school year 1981/1982
  • more than one half of the entire population of Slovenia are included
  • over 7 million sets of measurements
  • over 200,000 measured children and adolescents annually
     
  • in 2015 chidren were 1,3 % taller than in 1991
  • in 2015 children were 6 % heavier than in 1991
  • between 1991 and 2015 triceps skinfold increased for 13 %
  • body mass indeks of 11- to 19-year olds between 1939 and 2015 increased for one third among boys and one fifth among girls
  • in 2015 children showed 6 % less aerobic endurance than in 1991 which had negative impact on their health and academic performance
  • in 2015 muscular strength of arms and shoulders was 12 % lower than in 1991, which influences poor posture and increases risks of spinal problems in adult life
  • physical efficiency index of primary-school children increased from 49.7 in 2011 to 50.5 in 2015
  • the share of overweight children declined for 1.9 % between 2011 and 2015
  • there are considerable differences in nutritional and fitness status of students in different secondary-school programmes
  • in 2014 the male grammar-school students were 2.1 cm taller and 1.7 kg lighter than students from vocational schools while the difference in females was 2.3 cm and 1.6 kg
  • when a grammar-school student covered the 600 m running distance ta vocational-school student covered only 525 m
  • in 2014 grammar-school boys were able to persist in bent arm hang 15.2 seconds (25 %) more than boys from vocational schools and girls from grammar schools 14.8 seconds (38 %) more than their peers from vocational schools 

  • with the average height of almost 181 cm in boys and 167 cm in girls at age 18 Slovenian population is among the tallest in the world
  • children from Slovenia are among the fittest in Europe, for example the average result of the 12-year olds in Slovenia is at the 80th centile of their Spanish peers

  • in children, who were in the past years included in the Healthy Lifestyle project, aerobic fitness improved for 3 %

History

Tests battery was establish years before Eurofit and it based on the large scale physical fitness testing in Slovenia date from 60s and 70s of previous century. The system was implemented in 1982 on a sample of Slovenian schools and after 5 years of testing it was introduced to all Slovenian primary and secondary schools. Therefore, SLOfit enables annual monitoring of physical and motor status of children in all Slovenian schools from 1987 onwards.

About SLOfit

SLOfit is a national surveillance system for physical and motor development of children and youth which was formerly known as Sports Educational Chart. The system was implemented in 1982 on a sample of Slovenian schools and after 5 years of testing it was introduced to all Slovenian primary and secondary schools.

Contact

University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Sport
Laboratory for the Diagnostics of Somatic and Motor Development
Gortanova 22, 1000 Ljubljana



INFO SLOfit number:
00386 1 520 78 36
or
00386 41 601 438

 

E-mail: info@slofit.org

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