The participation in organised sport doubles the odds of meeting physical activity recommendations in 7–12-year-old children

Abstract The purpose of this study was to determine the contributing role of organised sport participation to daily physical activity (PA) and to describe the PA during training. Children aged 7–12 wore the accelerometer for 1 week. Children with activity data for a minimum of 5 days were included in the analysis (n = 492). Evenson cut-points were used to extract PA data for whole day and training sessions. Compliance with PA recommendations was assessed with two methods – weekly average and daily data. More than half (52.5%) of the children participated in an organised sport at least once a week. Participation in organised sport three or more times a week increased the odds of meeting PA recommendations (average method: OR = 4.02, 95% CI: 1.98–8.19, p < 0.001, days method: OR = 2.82, 95% CI: 1.35–5.88, p = 0.006). On average, children acquired 23.3 ± 15.3 min of moderate to vigorous PA (MVPA) during trainings, while boys accrued more MVPA minutes compared to girls (β = 5.2, 95% CI: 2.4–8.0) and the training time MVPA decreased with age (β = −1.0, 95% CI: −1.9 to −0.1), respectively. Each additional MVPA minute during training increased daily MVPA by 1.3 min (95% CI: 1.1–1.5). On days with training children accumulated 24.9 (95% CI: 21.8–28.0) more MVPA minutes compared to days without training. In conclusion, these findings highlight the importance of organised sport in supporting the PA levels of children. However, participation in the organised sport only is not sufficient to meet PA recommendations, and therefore, PA should be supported throughout the day.