Identification of the daily movement pattern of medical students during the vacation period

Abstract

Introduction: Medical students face an intense and challenging routine, with long hours of studies and practices. In this sense, lack of time, fatigue and overload of studies represent possible limits to the practice of daily physical activity, negatively impacting both physical and mental health. Objective: Identify the pattern of daily movement behavior (exercise and sedentary behavior) among medical students during the period of holidays and possible influences on the perception of physical and emotional recovery. Methods: This is a cross-sectional observational study, descriptive type. Foram academics of medicine between the 1st, 2nd and 3rd year. The information and data presented are collected with the use of the Google Forms tool during the first two weeks of return to regular classrooms (August 2023). The questionnaire was created in a remote tool, with questions dated and adapted from quests previously published in other research and adapted for the Portuguese language by professional specialist in the English language. The graphs were prepared in the statistical program GraphPad Prism 9. Foram included in the research of 167 students in the aforementioned years, those who responded correctly to the questionnaire, however, foram excluded, those who did not express their willingness to participate or did not receive a Free Consent Term e Clarified (TCLE). Results: An analysis of 167 academics showed that 44.3% and 39.5% of the students claimed to spend more than 8 hours per day sitting during the week and at the end of the week respectively, 32.3% of the students claimed they did not do anything. type of physical exercise or only once weekly and we did not observe differences in the preference of exercise time: morning (27.5%), afternoon (24.6%) or evening (23.4%). Increasingly, we observe that 42% report increased sleepiness in the first hours of the day, 23.4% report having little energy, 15% report feeling always tired at the end of the day, 29.4% report feeling quite a bit. and at the same time all stressed and 31.7% will allege a quality that is not ruim and very ruim. Conclusion: The observational study suggested that the pattern of daily movement of students during the holidays was characterized by a high tempo of sedentary behavior and by a practice of weekly physical exercise below the recommended level, which may be closely linked to a behavior in the quality of life, impacting significantly in the physical and mental health of students during the holiday period, affecting the psychophysiological recovery necessary for their return to classrooms.