Too much sport as bad as too little - study

Thursday November 21st, 2013

Teenagers who are driven towards sporting excellence, practising for hours daily, suffer ill-effects as much as those who do little activity, researchers claimed today.

A study conducted in Switzerland concludes that 14 hours a week of sporting practice is the maximum beneficial level for adolescents.

Researchers said that the benefits of activity seemed to be lost when teenagers engaged in more than 17.5 hours a week of sporting practice.

Some 1,200 people aged from 16 to 20 were involved in the study, reported in the Archives of Disease in Childhood.

Researchers sought to measure the physical and mental well-being of the teenagers using World Health Organisation criteria.

About 5% of the teenagers were undertaking "very high" levels of sporting activity - at more than 17.5 hours a week. Some 35% undertook less than four hours a week of sport.

Researchers found that people in both these groups were twice as likely as others to be assessed as suffering from "poor wellbeing", based on the criteria.

Researcher Professor Pierre-André Michaud, of Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois, Lausanne, Switzerland, reports: "While doubling the recommended weekly time spent playing sports to 14 hours seems to be good for mental and physical health at this age, going beyond this seems to be detrimental and ceases to be protective."

Archives of Disease in Childhood 21 November 2013 [abstract]

Tags: Europe | Fitness | Infancy to Adolescence

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