Fitback is a European project whose full name is “European Network for the Support of Development of Systems for Monitoring Physical Fitness of Children and Adolescents”. It aims to provide tools that will allow examination of population health trends, the effects of national fitness policies and interventions on child health at the local, regional, national and European level. FitBack will enable the prediction of future trends in population health by relating health risk to physical fitness status. The FitBack network has been developed in collaboration with 10 European partners who have been measuring physical fitness assessment in children and adolescents for a long time. This network is coordinated by the Faculty of Sports of the University of Ljubljana, in Slovenia, which has more than 30 years of experience in assessing the physical fitness of all schoolchildren in the country. Our PROFITH group was responsible for identifying and compiling all possible physical fitness data in Europe at school stage, achieving a total of 8 million data. These data were analysed to generate European reference values for physical fitness from 6 to 18 years old, which feed into the FitBack platform to interpret fitness results in relation to people of the same age and sex. The FitBack platform offers: 1) the possibility of generating interactive fitness reports (individual and group) automatically after inserting the results of the fitness assessment; 2) maps of Europe’s physical fitness; 3) 10-step guide to creating a fitness monitoring system. The platform is available in 7 languages and will be available in more than 13 languages in the near future.
Link to the FitBack platform (English): https://www.fitbackeurope.eu/en-us/
FitBack4Literay is the continuation of the FitBack project and aims to improve the functionality of the FitBack platform and prepare a package of tools that facilitate fitness monitoring in school context and provide relevant feedback to educators, children, young people and their parents, as a means to directly improve the development of Physical Literacy (PL). FitBack4Literacy brings together 10 partner institutions from across Europe, along with several international partner organisations, in an effort to expand the FitBack network in the research, education and sport sectors. The overall goal of FitBack4Literacy is to design and test an open, transnational web-based fitness monitoring tool for FitBack4Literacy. PL is a concept that includes the physical, social, cognitive, and emotional understanding that people develop to maintain physical activity at an appropriate and healthy level throughout their lives.
FitBack4Literacy will focus its activities at the local level (e.g. schools, sports clubs) to accelerate paediatric PL development through: 1) Engaging teachers and coaches in a co-design process to improve the existing FitBack system by building a PL toolkit containing group reports and learning materials, 2) Leverage the support of several international sport and physical education associations to engage stakeholders in a bid to reduce stigma and support a positive experience around fitness testing, and 3) Evaluate the improved FitBack reporting system, including a novel and multilingual PL toolkit, which will be tested at eight sites across Europe to determine its feasibility and effectiveness in improving PL. All these activities are carried out in various sectors, socio-cultural environments and levels of children’s physical fitness. Through the main outcome of the project, an open, multilingual web-based fitness reporting tool, FitBack4Literacy aims to provide a novel tool to help teachers, coaches and young people across Europe in the process of improving PL. In this way, FitBack4Literacy targets multiple UN Sustainable Development Goals in its effort to spread fitness expertise across multiple sectors, supporting and encouraging long-term positive health outcomes in young people.
FitBack project is now completed and all materials available on its website.
FitBack4Literary project is currently under development and the materials prepared and improvements to the platform will be incorporated into the FitBack website.
The European FitBack and FitBack4Literary projects were mainly funded by the Erasmus+ Programme (Sport, Youth and EU), references: 613010-EPP-1-2019-1-SI-SPO-SCP (FitBack), and 101089829 (FitBack4Literary)
Ortega, F. B., Leskošek, B., Blagus, R., Gil-Cosano, J. J., Mäestu, J., Tomkinson, G. R., Ruiz, J. R., Mäestu, E., Starc, G., Milanovic, I., Tammelin, T. H., Sorić, M., Scheuer, C., Carraro, A., Kaj, M., Csányi, T., Sardinha, L. B., Lenoir, M., Emeljanovas, A., …, Jurak, G., & FitBack Network. (2023). European fitness landscape for children and adolescents: updated reference values, fitness maps and country rankings based on nearly 8 million test results from 34 countries gathered by the FitBack network. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 57(5), 299–310.
https://doi.org/10.1136/bjsports-2022-106176
Joensuu, L., Csányi, T., Huhtiniemi, M., Kälbi, K., Magalhães, J., Milanović, I., Morrison, S. A., Ortega, F. B., Sardinha, L. B., Starc, G., Tammelin, T. H., Jurak, G., & FitBack Network. (2024). How to design and establish a national school-based physical fitness monitoring and surveillance system for children and adolescents: A 10-step approach recommended by the FitBack network. Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, 34(3), e14593.
https://doi.org/10.1111/sms.14593
Carraro, A., Santi, G., Colangelo, A., Mäestu, J., Milošević, V., Morrison, S. A., Olvera-Rojas, M., Podnar, H., & Jurak, G. (2023). Usability evaluation of the international FitBack web portal for monitoring youth fitness. Sport Sciences for Health, 19(4), 1363–1373.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11332-023-01117-0
Rojas, M. O., Cosano, J. J. G., Ruiz, J. R., Morrison, S. A., Kovač, M., Leskošek, B., Jurak, G., & Ortega, F. B. (2022). Valor científico y práctico de la plataforma Europea FitBack para las educadoras y educadores deportivos. Revista Española de Educación Física y Deportes, 463 (3).
https://doi.org/10.55166/reefd.vi463(3).1069
1) Fitback Webinar organized by PROFITH and COLEF Council
Watch full video (2 hours long, in Spanish) on YouTube on how to use the FitBack platform (+4000 views in the first year): https://www.youtube.com/live/QNIYgAGQ8do?feature=shared
2) Informative article about FitBack in TheConversation: https://theconversation.com/como-saber-si-los-escolares-estan-en-forma-186312
3) COLEF ANDALUSIA AWARDS 2023: The prize for the BEST PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE OF AN INNOVATIVE NATURE is awarded to the work entitled “Development and implementation of the European FitBack platform for the improvement of the professional practice of sports physical educators”, authors of the PROFITH group: Marcos Olvera-Rojas, Jose J. Gil-Cosano, Jonatan R. Ruiz, Francisco B Ortega: https://www.colefandalucia.com/_files/ugd/28d333_cea5ff5379d744eabb9c04690cb8fc39.pdf
