30 Years of SLOfit: Its Legacy and Perspective
Gregor Jurak
, Marjeta Kovač, Vedrana Sember, Gregor Starc
Faculty of Sport, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia
Keywords: Physical fitness, Children, Youth, Anthropometry, Test Battery, Physical Education
Abstract
Slovenia is a pioneer of surveillance of physical fitness of schoolchildren. For more than 30 years, national system SLOfit monitors and evaluates the annual changes in the physical fitness of children and adolescents aged 6 to 19. The purpose of this article is to present the legacy of the SLOfit and some further perspectives of its development.
The SLOfit is national physical fitness monitoring system in which almost the entire Slovenian school population is measured by 8 motor tests and 3 anthropometric measurements every April. Annual measurements allow researchers to constantly monitor the population developmental trends, while teachers use the analysed data to identify children with special developmental needs, to follow the development of every individual child and adjust the teaching process to the needs and capabilities of children. Centralised management and evaluation of data with unique feedback system enables children and parents to compare their development with the development of their peers and identify the needs for improvement. On the national level, the SLOfit data serves as scientific backbone for most of the physical activity policies, and the policies, related to school physical education. Slovenian educational policy, informed by the SLOfit data, managed to develop one of the most efficient system of physical education and extracurricular sports programs in the world, which results in very favourable level of physical fitness and physical activity of children in Slovenia in comparison to the rest of the world. In the future, we want to explore SLOfit even more for physical activity interventions. We have prepared a web application My SLOfit, which allows student, their parents, teachers and physician web access to students’ SLOfit results, with feedback about health risk. With support of My SLOfit we would like to introduce new paradigm of collaboration between school and health sectors in local settings.
Cite this article as: Jurak G, Kovač M, Sember V et al. 30 Years of SLOfit: Its Legacy and Perspective. Turk J Sports Med. 2019; 54(Suppl):23-27.
