Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Like adolescents around the world, many Mexican adolescents do not get enough physical activity or sleep, and get too much screen time. Girls are less likely to get enough physical activity than boys. However, it is unclear how girls are spending their time in the place of physical activity, and if these patterns differ throughout the week. Thus, our objective was to explore gender differences in composition of movement, i.e., light-intensity physical activity (LIPA), moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA), sedentary behaviour (SED), and sleep overall, and according to time of week (weekend/weekday). LIPA, MVPA, SED, and sleep were measured over 7 consecutive days using Fitbit Flex 2 devices in a sample of adolescent girls and boys attending public high schools in Guadalajara, Mexico (n=108, 60% girls). A compositional data analysis approach by gender was used with MANOVA. Bootstrap means and 95% confidence intervals for the log-ratio difference between boys and girls were generated with analyses repeated separately for weekday and weekend data, and back-transformed to the linear scale to calculate the proportion of time spent in each behaviour for boys compared to girls. There was a significant gender difference in the 24-hour movement composition. Boys spent more time in MVPA on weekdays and weekends. There were small but statistically significant gender differences in SED on weekdays. There were no gender differences for LIPA on weekdays or the weekend. Conclusions: Adolescent boys and girls had significantly different composition of movement. Girls engaged in less MVPA than boys throughout the week, with more sedentary time on weekdays, and more sleep on weekends. Boys and girls may need targeted support with different behaviours to achieve a healthy balance of movement behaviours.