Be fit, get into SLOfit

The SLOfit® programme is one of the world’s first national lifelong fitness surveillance systems, supported by the “My SLOfit app”, a web-based application which provides smart algorithms for data cleansing, and access to personal and school reports. Fitness reports are provided to end-users so they can see their own health risks, predict or keep track of their own physical development, etc. 

SLOfit was first created in the 1980s as a pedagogical tool to better assist physical education teachers who were tasked to guide the motor development of their students. SLOfit is now used not only for this purpose, but also to promote physical activities adapted for all generations of Slovenian citizens. SLOfit is focused on raising awareness for all generations to engage in healthy lifestyle choices, and create better access to its online infrastructure for promoting sport & physical fitness surveillance activities for all. Thus, the SLOfit system nowadays consists of a school-based SLOfit Students programme, and a SLOfit Adults programme which can be performed in the educational, sport, occupational or health sector.   

Since SLOfit enables users to monitor their individual fitness changes over time it can also prepare tailored exercise interventions for fitness improvement, and insight on any physical fitness changes or challenges in any given class/group, school/organisation, municipality, region or national level; this long-term surveillance capability provides important long-term information for policy makers.   

Moreover, SLOfit has been created as a modern societal infrastructure which could provide an ability to test causal associations between physical fitness in childhood and future health outcomes based on the lifelong surveillance of one’s physical fitness, including several physical activity-related health risk factors. These connections will be explored in future as the children tested in SLOfit Students age and have the opportunity to continue monitoring their own fitness trends as adults. 

In summary, the SLOfit system is free-of-charge and consists of:  

• 3 unique test batteries that are selected based on the age and capacity of the individual   

• the My SLOfit web-based application which contains a feedback reporting system based on the individual's scores, 

• training programs for test operators/facilitators, 

• promotional activities through various media channels.  

In the narrow sense,  SLOfit Students 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).