Physically inactive adolescents’ experiences of engaging in physical activity

Abstract

Purpose: This study aimed to describe physically inactive adolescents’ experiences and reflections about engaging in physical activity.

Methods: Nine graduate students from the third year of upper secondary school (six women and three men) participated in this study. Narrative interviews were used for data collection and qualitative content analysis was used to analyse the interviews.

Results: The analysis revealed three themes ‘Acknowledging resistance and barriers to performing physical activity’, ‘Knowing that it is good is not enough’, and ‘Feeling included and accepted is fun and motivating’. These themes show that the adolescent’s experienced barriers, acknowledged pros and cons and identified possibilities to be physically active.

Conclusions: Identifying experiences that impact on inactive adolescents’ attitude and willingness to perform physical activity can be useful to understand the needs of the individual. By relating these experiences to the different stages of the transtheoretical model, this study could provide valuable knowledge for designing future interventions to enhance physical activity in this target group.

Keywords:

• Physical activity
• self-efficacy
• transtheoretical model
• qualitative research

Acknowledgements

We thank the participants for taking part in this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.