In Slovenia, the national SLOfit surveillance system of the somatic and motor development
of children and youth has been enabling researchers to observe the developmental trends
of the entire population of school-aged children since 1987. The national database
currently incorporates over 7.2 million sets of measurements of eight fitness tests
and three anthropometric measurements. Since 1991, as in the rest of the world, in
Slovenia, there is a common perception that the physical fitness of contemporary children
is in decline and below the level of the physical fitness of the previous generation's
childhood fitness. Our paper examines the trends of physical fitness in 26 birth cohorts
of 7-10-year-olds. The analysis shows that the secular trends of physical fitness
in boys and especially in girls have been positive and that the level of physical
fitness of recent birth cohorts exceeds the national average of physical fitness of
the 1989-2019 period. At the same time, the analysis reveals that the distribution
of physical fitness has been changing from almost normal in the cohorts born in the
first half of the 1980s, toward positively skewed in the subsequent cohorts born before
the year 2000, and bimodal distribution in the later cohorts, indicating growing inequality
and polarization of the motor development of children.
