Boys Who Exercise Earn More as Adults

It pays to exercise, literally. A 30 year study out of Finland uncovered this fascinating correlation.

The Finnish study reported in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, the official journal of the American College of Sports Medicine, found that children who participate regularly in physical activity earn higher earnings when they start working in adulthood. That held true only if the children were boys.

No such relation was observed among women said, Jaana T. Kari, a Ph.D. student, from Likes – Research Centre for Sport and Health Sciences.

The 30 year study began in 1980 and included nearly 5, 000 children ages 9, 12, and 15 years. Researchers measured their physical activity through questionnaires. They randomly chose the children and the group consisted of 51% boys and 49% girls. All were from five Finnish university cities and their rural surroundings.

According to writer Jeanette Wang, researchers followed the study group until 2010 when the average age of their subjects was 41 years. They gathered their information on earnings from the Finnish Longitudinal Employer-Employee Data of Statistics, Finland which covered a 10-year period from 2000 to 2010.

Wang reports that the researchers found that a higher level of leisure-time physical activity at the age of nine, 12 and 15 years was linked with an approximate 12 to 25% increase in average earnings over a 10-year period. This held true after accounting for individual and family background factors such as an individual’s chronic health conditions, body fat, parents’ education and physical activity, and family income.

Kari finds the study results significant from a public policy perspective. She points out that if childhood physical activity can boost an individual’s labor productivity, then increasing participation in physical activities should constitute an important policy goal.

“Encouraging children to be physically active, providing them with equal possibilities to participate in physical activities regardless of their socioeconomic background, and targeting interventions to children and youth with the lowest physical activity levels should become an important policy objective”, she said.