Activity Levels in Mums and their Children 'directly linked'.

Recent research conducted from Cambridge and Southampton universities have discovered that the more active a mother is, the more physically active her child is. The study examined 500 mums and their 4 year old children. They wore heart-rate monitors to measure their activity levels over a 7 day period. The research also discovered that many of these mothers' exercise levels fell way below the recommended levels and factors such as if they had a job and whether the child had any siblings, influenced the mother's activity levels. The researchers concluded that parents have an important role to play in developing healthy exercise habits early on in life and the more activity a mother did, the more active her child would be and it was likely that activity in one of the pair influenced activity in the other. The study also discovered that for every minute of moderate-to-vigorous activity a mother engaged in, her child was more likely to engage in 10% more of the same level of activity and for every hour that a mother was sedentary than their children would be sedentary for nearly 11 minutes.