Sport – only one element of daily physical activity

Participation in organised or volitional sport and exercise programmes can contribute to daily physical activity quotas. However, our recent population-based research measuring lifetime physical activity produced an unexpected finding – sporting activity formed a small fraction of overall physical activity compared with occupational and household activity (figure 1). This was true whether sport was measured as energy expenditure or as knee and hip joint force.2

Historically, epidemiological studies primarily based physical activity estimates on occupation. These data were gender biased due to the male-dominated workforce. As physical activity has declined significantly in most occupations, there has been a greater emphasis in recent decades for physical activity inventories to capture sports and leisure-time activity. Despite this shift, we found that the occupation and household domains remain the most important. Using a rigorously developed and validated3 computer-guided lifetime physical activity questionnaire in a sample of 4269 Canadian adults aged 45–90 years, we found that …