Frequently asked questions

FitBack is the European Network for the Support of Development of Systems for Monitoring Physical Fitness of Children and Adolescents at the local, regional, national and European level. The FitBack project will allow examination of population health trends, the effects of national fitness policies and interventions on child health, and enable the prediction of future trends in population health related to physical fitness. This website is designed as a platform to find additional information on creating fitness reports, getting information on European research trends to do with child fitness, and providing information to its end-users (e.g. parents, teachers, policy-makers, health professionals).

The project has two main sections which are aimed at different target groups: 

1. For Parents, Children and Teachers: The FitBack online platformprovides a user-friendly graphical report with information about an individual’s physical fitness based on the relevant reference values. 
    
2. For Policy Makers: TheFitBack web platform serves as an information point for policy makers at local, regional and national levels. FitBack provides  essential information on how to establish physical fitness monitoring systems for children and adolescents in their own communities and regions. 

Children and adolescents

You can compare your fitness results with your previous results, with your peers from across Europe, and within your country, as well as seeing whether you have any health-risk associated with your current physical fitness status.

Parents

You can see whether your child has any potential health-risks based on their FitBack report. You can then modify your family’s behaviour and choices to encourage greater physical activity minutes within his/her 24-hour movement behaviours; you can use the information in the report to consult with your child’s teacher, trainer, doctor or kinesiologist on appropriate strategies and interventions, if you so desire.

Teachers, coaches and doctors

You can use the FitBack report as an educational tool for developing greater physical literacy (link) in the students, as well as get information about the health risks of each child based on their fitness testing. With this valuable data, you can better plan and evaluate your teaching, coaching, and physical activity interventions based on the children’s’ FitBack reports.

It is intended for students, parents, teachers, coaches, doctors, scientists and policymakers. In the next sections of FAQs you can see what the benefits for each target group. 

If you are a scientist or policy maker and you want to participate in this venture, please see here for instructions on how to join us.  

On FitBack’s homepage, there is a “Make report” drop-down menu. After clicking on this tab, users will be re-directed to the Make report page where they can choose between creating an individual and/or group reports. For more information click here. 

No. Your data will not be stored anywhere. It will only be used to create and print your personal report, and afterwards all information is completely removed. 

The FitBack platform allows you to compare your current physical fitness results with your previous results, with peers from across Europe and within your own country, as well as seeing whether you may be at increased health-risk in some of your fitness indicator scores. 

Yes. The application is adapted for use on a computer and also on a mobile phone. 

Yes, of course. Check out these instructions on how to perform each measurement properly. It would be great if your parents or brother or sister could help you. 

You can see whether your child has any potential health-risks based on their FitBack report.  We hope the FitBack platform can provide helpful choices to encourage all family members to partake in more minutes of physical activity throughout the whole day You can also share the interactive report information with your child’s teacher, coach, doctor or kinesiologist to get their expert feedback as well..   

You can use the FitBack report as an educational tool for developing greater physical literacy in your students and get information about the health risks of each child based on their fitness testing. With this valuable data, you can better plan and evaluate your teaching, coaching, and physical activity interventions based on children’s FitBack reports. 

Up to 30. You can directly import an Excel file and export the results immediately (see the instructions here). 

Unfortunately, the FitBack platform does not currently offer such monitoring, as the data is not stored on the server. However, you can still save the results to your computer and compare them each year yourself. 

Yes. The advice on how to improve different components of physical fitness can be found here. 

You can use the FitBack interactive reports feature for giving fitness feedback to participants of your own study . The FitBack platform provides scientists with percentile scores and health risk categories for most physical fitness components for children and adolescents, so you will have a way of interpreting your own study’s results to your clients. 

Yes. You can do this by pressing the ‘export data’ button at the bottom of the page (Excel icon). 

Here is a step-by-step guide on how to set up a fitness monitoring system. If you would like direct counseling on this, feel free to contact us anytime for more detailed feedback and suggestions. 

This depends on several factors, so it is very difficult to estimate and must be considered on a case-by-case basis.

Some factors to consider are the current competencies of teachers in your school system for carrying out the fitness testing, creating an organisational model of testing (time, personnel, equipment), creating a model of personal data protection, IT solution for entering, cleaning and analyzing data, and providing timely reports back to the parents, students and teachers, the amount (and quality) of supporting teaching materials, and modes of communication with stakeholders etc. For more information, you can check out the costs of well-established monitoring systems already in action around the EU in this document.