Slovenian youth getting weaker, less flexible

Slovenia's latest nationwide fitness tests for kids and youth show the post-Covid rebound has hit a wall: children's strength, coordination and flexibility have flatlined or even slipped since last year, leaving key measures stubbornly below pre-pandemic levels.

The country has an annual fitness test for all school kids from the first grade of primary school through to the end of secondary school. Around 116,000 kids between ages 7 and 19 took part, CE Report quotes The Slovenia Times.

This year's results show that coordination, muscle mass and flexibility are all lagging behind 2019 results by more than 5%.

The trend is even more worrying compared to last year: there has been a decrease in physical efficiency in boys and a stagnation in girls. The differences between the most and least fit children also widened.

After processing more than 60% of data, the results show that the effects the Covid-19 measures had on children have not yet waned.

Physical fitness of boys is still 4% below pre-pandemic levels, while the physical fitness of girls is 7% lower. Most concerning is that after stagnating last year the trend is now worsening.

"We detected last year that the first trend of improvements after the pandemic stopped, we detected stagnation and alerted to it. This year it sadly evolved into a regression," said the head of the fitness test system SLOFit, Gregor Starc.

"We are seeing a decline in children's physical efficiency. The index of physical efficiency decreased more for boys, while for girls it is at almost the same level as last year," he said.

Children are getting weaker, which is reflected in a decrease in explosive power, and more tense, as evident in poorer flexibility.