Physical education teachers' and principals' perspectives on the use of FitnessGram.

Objectives: FitnessGram is commonly used to measure physical fitness and improve physical activity and health in youth. However, little is known about its use for informing physical activity and health promotion policy within schools and school districts, especially from the perspective of key decision-makers like principals. Therefore, this study examined physical education teachers' and principals' perceptions of FitnessGram use and its relationship with school and district efforts to promote physical activity.

Indicators of activity-friendly communities: an evidence-based consensus process.

Background: Regular physical activity, even at modest intensities, is associated with many health benefits. Most Americans, however, do not engage in the recommended levels. As practitioners seek ways to increase population rates of physical activity, interventions and advocacy efforts are being targeted to the community level.

The relationship between convenience of destinations and walking levels in older women.

Purpose: To examine the relationship between physical activity and (1) convenience of destinations, measured by whether destinations (such as a park, trail, businesses, and services) are within walking distance of the home, and (2) participants' perception of the quality of their neighborhood surroundings for walking, captured with a global neighborhood "walkability" rating.

Design: Cross-sectional analysis of data obtained in 1999.

Setting: Community in southwest Pennsylvania.

Relationship between urban sprawl and physical activity, obesity, and morbidity.

Purpose: To determine the relationship between urban sprawl, health, and health-related behaviors.

Design: Cross-sectional analysis using hierarchical modeling to relate characteristics of individuals and places to levels of physical activity, obesity, body mass index (BMI), hypertension, diabetes, and coronary heart disease.

Setting: U.

Opportunities for integrating public health and urban planning approaches to promote active community environments.

The growing emphasis on promoting environmental change as a means to increase physical activity has motivated conversation and collaboration between researchers and practitioners in the fields of public health and urban planning. Although these fields share similar objectives, their methodological approaches for examining the association between the environment and behavior often differ in significant ways. To facilitate communication, this article discusses ways these fields can collaborate in developing and applying conceptual frameworks, adopting behavioral and environmental measures, and strengthening study designs.

Health promoting community design: a new paradigm to promote healthy and active communities.

Richard Killingsworth explains that we have engineered routine forms of physical activity out of our daily lives, and that this is an important contributor to the obesity epidemic which claims at least 200,000 lives each year in the United States alone. A new field of study is emerging to address this problem, and the American Journal of Health Promotion has launched a new editorial section called "Health Promoting Community Design" to provide a forum to disseminate research in this new area.

How the built environment affects physical activity: views from urban planning.

The link between the built environment and human behavior has long been of interest to the field of urban planning, but direct assessments of the links between the built environment and physical activity as it influences personal health are still rare in the field. Yet the concepts, theories, and methods used by urban planners provide a foundation for an emerging body of research on the relationship between the built environment and physical activity. Recent research efforts in urban planning have focused on the idea that land use and design policies can be used to increase transit use as well as walking and bicycling.

Theoretical approaches to the promotion of physical activity: forging a transdisciplinary paradigm.

Background: Research in the physical activity promotion arena has focused on the application of theoretical perspectives aimed primarily at personal levels of understanding and analysis. The investigation of such theories has provided some insights related to potentially useful mediators of physical activity behavior. However, to continue to expand this field, new perspectives on personal-level theories, in addition to the exploration of more macro-level conceptual perspectives, are required.