1. Introduction
Physical activity (PA) is defined as “any bodily movement produced by skeletal muscles that requires energy expenditure (...)” according to the World Health Organization (WHO) [
1]. As a result, it is possible to differentiate between activities that are necessary for maintaining life and those whose main goal is to have fun, socialize, develop physical fitness, or even compete [
2]. According to Devís [
3], any intentional movement of the skeletal muscles that necessitates the use of energy and permits interaction with others and the environment is referred to as PA. Likewise, depending on the WHO [
4], “a condition of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not only the absence of disease or infirmity” is what is meant by the idea of health. The WHO emphasizes the crucial part that exercise plays in promoting healthy aging and a high quality of life [
5], recognizing exercise as a planned, scheduled, repetitive subset of PA with the ultimate or intermediate goal of enhancing or maintaining physical fitness [
6]. In this way, physical inactivity (PI) has developed into a public health issue, leading to a variety of diseases such as degenerative, cardiovascular, metabolic, and various forms of cancer [
7]. However, a sizable part of adults (31%) and teenagers (80%) are currently categorized as being insufficiently active [
8]. Thus, the WHO have made a tremendous effort to make the population aware of the PA recommendations that should be developed for good health [
9].
In this context, for the population affected by sedentary habits, the college years are a crucial time for the formation of lifestyle habits, which can have a long-term effect on the development of chronic diseases [
10]. When it comes to physical activity, college students are likewise less active than the average adult population [
11]. For instance, research shows that over 70% of college students do not walk the suggested 10,000 steps a day [
12]. Various reports and publications have identified universities and schools as places to raise awareness and educate students about healthy behavioral choices, including healthy dietary practices, regular PA, and weight management [
13,
14]. Also, the COVID-19 pandemic-related measures resulted in the complete shutdown of educational facilities, including higher education institutions [
15], requiring the university population to adjust to a primarily virtual learning environment [
16]. The pandemic’s impacts are especially alarming because, even before the epidemic, it has been observed that a significant portion of university students worldwide are physically inactive [
17], even greater than the global age-standardized prevalence [
11]. In addition, a recently published investigation that included a systematic review and meta-analysis found that this cohort spent an average of nine hours per day inactive, on average, during the previous ten years [
18].
In this sense, the relationship between knowledge and actual PA has been the subject of studies that have yielded contradictory results [
19], despite the fact that the knowledge and understanding of the guidelines are essential prerequisites for maintaining and/or complying with PA recommendations [
20]. There are many factors that influence participation in PA, for example, men have higher levels of PA, and their greater participation in heavy work may be the fundamental cause [
21]. Similarly, individuals who had completed college or higher had a greater probability of engaging in physical exercise compared to those who could not read and write, possibly because of their previous contact with physical education programs [
22]. Also, according to various studies [
23,
24], the knowledge of PA recommendations was a predictor of the level of PA, and those who were aware of the recommendations performed much more PA than those who were not. Loughlan and Mutrie observed a significant increase in PA levels after providing research participants with general exercise and PA recommendations [
25]. In view of the above, school educators have a crucial responsibility and influence on the PA levels of students. Teacher support has been identified as a positive predictor of student participation in PA [
26], with low levels of teacher support being one of the main barriers to PA practice [
27]. It has also been shown that teachers with PA knowledge are able to improve PA levels and fundamental movement skills better than other teachers [
28]. To this end, research points to effective motivation as essential to achieve higher levels of PA [
29], with teacher training programs being of great use in order to enhance the motivation of their students, increasing their intentions to be physically active [
30].
As can be seen in numerous previous investigations, there are several questionnaires related to PA [
22,
31,
32,
33,
34], but all of them focus on collecting information about PA levels or about factors affecting PA practice. However, few attempts have been made to understand the relationship between the knowledge about PA and PA practice [
35], finding the imperative need to adapt physical exercise programs to generate this knowledge in the population and not only focus on physical and psychological improvements, so that there is greater adherence to PA. Given the low levels of PA in adolescents reported by the WHO, it is critical and important to have methods to evaluate and monitor the amount of knowledge that students and educators have about the guidelines on PA and health. With this knowledge, decision makers can put programs and policies into place that affect raising PA rates and enhancing efficacy. Similarly, the use of reliable and validated measurement methods to assess the understanding of PA recommendations seems to have a positive impact in certain populations [
36], especially those with higher levels of PI. Nevertheless, Spanish-speaking communities around the world lack reliable instruments to collect information about the knowledge on PA recommendations, so that the measures and strategies implemented to improve them do not have prior information to be adapted to the target population. Along these lines, the Colombian university population lacks studies that analyze their current state of knowledge about the WHO recommendations. Due to all of the above, this research aims to evaluate the level of knowledge that students of the Faculty of Education Sciences of the University of Tolima have about PA recommendations for children and adolescents, analyzing the possible differences that exist in the student body according to gender, age, and their levels of PA. Likewise, the aim is to assess the construct validity, internal consistency, and reliability of the CUAFYS-A questionnaire [
37] to analyze university students’ knowledge of international PA recommendations, making it one of the few scientific evaluation tools available.
4. Discussion
This study was born out of two needs expressed by the literature: (1) to discover the level of knowledge that university students have about health and PA, and (2) to define a valid and reliable instrument to gather information on the knowledge of PA recommendations in the university population. For this purpose, the questions of the CUAFYS-A instrument were analyzed, taking into account that gender, age, and level of PA could influence knowledge. In addition, the construct validity, internal consistency, and reliability of the instrument were analyzed, resulting in a nine-item single-factor structure with excellent goodness-of-fit indices and satisfactory reliability indicators. Also, in the present investigation, it was observed that, in general, future male teachers have a higher average knowledge of the WHO recommendations on PA and health than female future teachers. Also, people between 20 and 29 years of age are the most aware of these recommendations, and those university students who have higher levels of PA report higher scores.
In terms of gender, it is generally women who perform less PA [
60,
61,
62], with a frequency between 10 min and 1 h, while men usually perform at least 1 h of sports practice [
63]. This trend has already been noted by Han and colleagues [
64], who identified a reduction in PA levels during the transition from high school to university, which was more pronounced in female students. Likewise, not only the lack of time seems to be a relevant factor, in the case of women, as other aspects such as physical social anxiety associated with body image, exhaustion, or laziness or the environment and a lack of facilities are found to be the primary causes of physical inactivity [
65]. However, studies focusing primarily on PA knowledge show mixed results. According to the study by Jáuregui-Lobera and Oliveras López [
66], there were no statistically significant gender differences in any of the questions about the knowledge of PA. Likewise, Keating et al. [
67] explored the knowledge levels of U.S. university students without finding significant differences in terms of gender. This fact has also been exposed by more recent research, which has pointed out that there are no gender differences in terms of the knowledge of PA recommendations [
68]. In contrast, in a more recent research by Gómez-Mazorra et al. [
60], significant differences were obtained, with a higher mean for the male gender. Similarly, Plotnikoff et al. [
69] noted gender differences in the knowledge of the guidelines in a large Canadian population.
On the other hand, it has been shown that there are no significant differences in terms of student age in relation to PA and health knowledge. No significant variations in age were found by Práxedes et al. [
70], which supports this as well. However, a number of studies suggest that PA levels fall as children enter adolescence [
71], with this decline being more pronounced in females than in boys [
72]. Adolescents are one of the population groups who do not prioritize their health needs; also, their unhealthy behaviors, developed at a young age, lead to major health issues as adults, putting them at a higher risk in terms of their physical, social, and psychological aspects [
73]. In maturity, this lower trend persists, demonstrating the gradual renunciation of this lifestyle practice over time [
74,
75]. Similar to this, a cross-sectional research of students from high schools and universities revealed that university students had lower PA levels [
76,
77]. However, it has also been discovered that there are higher levels of PA practice in those who have completed their university education [
78] and in those who are over the age of 21 [
79]. It follows that they are more informed about the advantages of exercise and how it improves their health, as the results of this study seem to indicate.
Considering the self-perception of future teachers about being physically active, those with a positive self-perception showed better results. This issue was also observed by Knox and coworkers [
80], who found that a failure to comply with physical activity recommendations was a strong predictor of a lack of knowledge of them. Similarly, another study in Africa [
81] showed a positive association between the participation in PA and a good knowledge of PA recommendations. Another study conducted among Chinese university students found almost identical results to the present investigation, reporting that only 4% of the university students were aware of the recommendations and that they showed significantly higher PA levels and emphasizing the low prevalence of this knowledge in future physical education teachers (around 14%) [
68]. This trend has been confirmed by an international study that included university students from 23 countries, which found a clear relationship between PI and a low knowledge of PA recommendations, although this was mostly found in men [
17]. The explanation for these results is multifactorial, as other studies have already pointed out [
82], since interventions that provide information on PA recommendations do not directly improve PA levels but do improve the intention to practice PA [
83]. In addition, the positive association between knowledge and practice may be mainly due to the fact that they share common mediators such as ethnicity, level of education, economic status, or their health functionality [
84].
Limitations and Future Lines of Research
As in other studies, this research also has a series of limitations. First, given that only university students were included in the sample, there are factors that could have influenced the results obtained, such as age and its grouping by tens, sociodemographic characteristics, and the students’ school grade. Also, the division into age ranges, although it obeyed maturity stages throughout the life cycle, only collected 11 responses in the group over 30 years of age, so that comparisons between groups may not yield conclusive results. Similarly, sociodemographic information that could be interesting for this study, such as academic year, field of study, or nutritional habits, was not widely collected from the participants. Finally, it should be noted that there are very few previous studies that analyze the knowledge that university students have about health and PA. Rather, whether they are physically active or inactive is analyzed. On the other hand, possible future lines of research would be to extend the sample to a national level, instead of carrying out the experiment in only one faculty, therefore omitting the criterion that it has to be exclusively students from Tolima, to choose a more appropriate grouping method for age in case this could have contributed to the results, analyzing whether, in this case, age has an influence and whether women continue to be less active than men. Likewise, it would be interesting to include questions in the scales whose focus of analysis is lifestyles and various nutritional issues. In this case, knowing the reasons would be helpful, as they may be not only due to work, academic, and/or family tasks but also due to a lack of motivation. Consequently, it is essential to reach an agreement with other researchers in different communities to collect all the necessary data. In the same way, it could be of interest to promote longitudinal research after providing different types of education on PA recommendations to university students, exploring the sociodemographic factors that mediate them and which interventions have a greater impact in both the short and long term. Furthermore, it should not be forgotten that it is essential to train teachers using innovative and motivating methodologies, so that university students have carried them out before reaching the university stage, so that they can perform PA correctly and obtain all the psychological, physical, and social benefits that it brings to the health and well-being of individuals.