Background

The outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) at the end of 2019 disrupted conventional teaching worldwide [1]. In 2020, to meet government requirements that students and teachers should be isolated at home, colleges and universities suspended in-person teaching and adopted various forms of online teaching [2]. Although isolation effectively controlled the spread of COVID-19, it decreased daily physical activity and increased sedentary behaviour, which resulted in a decline in physical health [3, 4]. Studies [5, 6] have suggested that moderate physical activity is beneficial for alleviating the symptoms of COVID-19, reducing sedentary time, and improving physical health.

Online physical education (PE) has two advantages. First, there are rich teaching resources, including videos, slides and documents, available to support online PE. Second, online teaching transcends the limitations of region, time and space and makes physical education more visual, as students can watch videos repeatedly. However, regarding physical education teaching, orally communicating or watching videos is not enough; teachers need to guide students through body movements individually, which is difficult to do online [7]. Moreover, it is difficult for teachers to supervise students during online instruction [8].

To the best of our knowledge, there are few studies that focus on the impact of online physical education teaching on college students during the COVID-19 pandemic.The aim of our research is to provide insight into the impact of online physical education on the physical development of college students by comparatively analysing the physical fitness test results of students enrolled at Wannan Medical College for three consecutive years from 2019 to 2021, corresponding to the early (2019), middle (2020) and late (2021) periods of the pandemic; another aim is to further provide directions and suggestions for the future of physical education teaching.

Method

The subjects of the experiment were 3360 college students at Wannan medical college (i.e., 1490 male students and 1870 female students) enrolled in 2019, with an age range from 17 to 22. Most of the students were from Anhui Province. The experiments were approved by the Research Ethics Review Committee of Wannan Medical College (Ref No:2022-093), and the students consent was obtained before the experiments. Physical fitness tests of all subjects were conducted from 2019 to 2021 and included indexes such as body mass index (BMI), vital capacity (VC), 50-metre run, sit and reach, standing long jump, pull-ups (male), 1000-metre run (male), sit-ups (female) and 800-metre run (female).

The status quo of physical education at Wannan Medical College

In 2019, in-person physical education classes were held once a week for one and a half hours each time. The duration of each class included a 15-minute warm-up, 1-hour exercise and 15-minute cool-down. The outbreak of the pandemic at the end of 2019 prompted the launch of online physical education classes in 2020. During the two semesters that occurred in 2020,1-hour online physical education classes were carried out once a week with multiple options, including basketball, volleyball, football, tennis, handball, badminton, table tennis, aerobics, yoga, taekwondo and Chinese martial arts. In 2021, in-person physical education resumed.

Measurement of physical fitness data

In China, students’ physical fitness is measured by an annual physical fitness test. In our experiments, to ensure fairness, the physical fitness tests were conducted by the same group of physical education teachers from Wannan Medical College. All tests were conducted from 8:00 am to 12:00 am and from 2:00 pm to 5:00 pm in December from 2019 to 2021. The following are items included in the annual physical fitness test.

BMI

BMI is calculated as the ratio of the weight in kilometres to the square of the height in metres. Height is measured by taking the length of students from the highest point of their head to their heel when they stand up straight after taking off their shoes. Weight is measured when students are wearing their usual clothing. According to the standards set by the World Health Organization (WHO), students are generally divided into four groups by BMI values, e.g., underweight (BMI<18.5 kg/m\(^2\)), normal (18.5<BMI<23.9 kg/m\(^2\)), overweight (24\(\le\)BMI<27.9 kg/m\(^2\)), and obese (BMI\(\ge\)28 kg/m\(^2\)).

VC

VC, as an important cardiorespiratory function estimator, uses a specialized spirometry tester to record the maximum volume of exhaled air after maximum volume of inhalation air.

50-metre run

This index evaluates the speed and acceleration of students in seconds in a single 50-metre sprint.

Sit-and-reach

This index aims to assess flexibility. During the test process, students remain in a seated position with legs straight and hands stretched forwards as far as possible. By how much students’ hands exceed their feet is recorded in centimetres as the index value.

Standing long jump

The aim of this index is to assess explosive power by recording the length in centimetres when students try to jump as far as possible from a starting line.

Sit-up (female)

This index evaluates muscular endurance by recording the number of sit-ups completed within 60 seconds. During each sit-up, a female student holds her head, bends her legs from a supine position, and sits up as high as possible.

Pull-up (male)

To assess muscular endurance, this index records the number of pull-ups completed in 60 seconds. During each pull-up, a male student suspends from the horizontal bar with his hands, pulls himself up until his chin is above the horizontal bar, and then comes back down with his arms as straight as possible.

800-metre run (female)/1000-metre run (male)

To assess muscular endurance, this index records the time in seconds it takes students to run 800/1000 metres on a standard track.

Data analysis

Physical fitness test data was analysed by SPSS 27.0 (SPSS Inc.). The mean and standard deviation were used to quantify the quantitative variables, while the frequency and percentage were used to describe qualitative variables. Repeated measures ANOVA method was used in physical fitness test indices at three consecutive time points from 2019 to 2021. The Greenhouse-Geisser correction was applied when Mauchly’s hypothesis test did not meet the assumption of sphericity, and the Bonferroni method was used for pairwise comparisons.

Results

A total of 3360 students (1490 males and 1870 females) completed physical fitness tests from 2019 to 2021.The statistics of the subjects are grouped by the test years (2019, 2020 and 2021) and shown in Table 1, which shows that for the three-year average, the overweight and obesity of male students was significantly higher than that of female students (28.0% vs. 12.7%), the normal weight of male students was lower than that of female students (60.9% vs. 72.9%), and the underweight of female students was higher than that of male students (23.0% vs. 11.1%).

Table 1 The basic characteristics of student subjects grouped by gender
Full size table

The results show that for males, from 2019 to 2021, the proportions of underweight, overweight and obese students decreased, while the proportion of normal-weight students increased. For females, the proportions of normal-weight, overweight and obese students decreased during 2020 and then remained stable in 2021. The proportion of underweight individuals increased in 2020 and then rebounded in 2021.

Tables 2 and 3 compare the results of the physical fitness tests of male and female students over three consecutive years from 2019 to 2021. The two tables show remarkable similarities in male and female students. First, there were significant differences (P < 0.05) in the scores of male and female students in various tests in 2019 compared to 2020 and 2021. Second, compared with 2021, male and female students had significant differences in all test scores except those for sit-ups (P = 1.000) in 2020.

Table 2 The multiple comparative analysis of the three-year physical fitness tests on male students
Full size table
Table 3 The multiple comparative analysis of the three-year physical fitness tests on female students
Full size table

Figures 1 and 2 show the average and 95% CI of items of the physical fitness tests on male and female students from 2019 to 2021. Compared with 2020, in 2019, for male students, the lung capacity increased by 282 ml, the sit-and-reach increased by 0.9 cm, and the 1000-metre run decreased by 6 seconds. For female students, the vital capacity increased by 292 milliliters, the sit-and-reach increased by 1.7 cm, and the 800-metre run dropped by 7 seconds. Compared with 2021, in 2020, for male students, the mean vital capacity increased by 66 ml, the mean standing long jump increased by 4 cm, and the mean time of 1000-metre run increased by 4 seconds. For female students, the mean time of 50-metre run increased by 0.1 seconds, and the mean time of 800-metre run increased by 4 seconds.

Fig. 1
figure 1

The average and 95% CI of items of the physical fitness tests on male students from 2019 to 2021

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Fig. 2
figure 2

The average and 95% CI of items of the physical fitness tests on female students from 2019 to 2021

Full size image

Discussion

The purpose of this study is to provide deep insight into the impact of online physical education on the physical fitness of college students during the pandemic. Physical fitness tests were conducted on students enrolled at a university in Anhui Province in China during December of 2019, 2020 and 2021. We found that the number of overweight and obese female students has declined since the COVID-19 outbreak in 2019, which is worthy of attention. The resulting analysis also shows that for all student subjects, lung capacity has increased significantly, while the performances in the 800/1000-metre runs have decreased sharply; these results are consistent with the results of the XIA study [

Availability of data and materials

The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

We sincerely express our gratitude to all participants.

Funding

This research was supported by the Major Project of Humanities and Social Sciences of Anhui Universities (Grant Number:SK2017ZD17). Youth Foundation for Humanities and Social Science Research of the Ministry of Education, (Grant Number:21YJC890052). Teaching Reform Project of Wannan Medical College (Grant Number:2022jbgs01). The funding bodies had no role in the design of the study, collection, analysis, and interpretation of data or in writing the manuscript.

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Author notes

  1. Jun Sun and Jie Chang contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Public Foundation, Wannan Medical College, Wuhu, China

    Jun Sun, Ergang Zhu, Xugui Sun & **aohong Chen

  2. Department of Medical Information, Wannan Medical College, Wuhu, China

    Jie Chang

  3. College of Physical Education, Anhui Normal University, Wuhu, China

    Yu Tao

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Contributions

SJ and CJ participated in the data collection and manuscript drafting. ZEG and SXG participated in the data collection. TY participated in the data pre-processing. CXH, TY and CJ participated in the design and statistical analysis of the study. All the authors agreed on the final manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to **aohong Chen.

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Ethics approval and consent to participate

Ethical approval and consent to participate in this study were approved by the Ethics Committee of Wannan Medical College and collected written informed consent from either students or their parents or guardians respectively. The study was conducted in accordance with approved national guidelines.

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Not applicable.

Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

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Sun, J., Chang, J., Zhu, E. et al. Comparative research on the development of college students’ physical fitness based on online physical education during the COVID-19 pandemic. BMC Public Health 23, 742 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-023-15599-7

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