engleski

Predictors influencing the involvement of the elderly in physical activities

The aging crisis is spreading worldwide. Croatia is no exemption since the life expectancy in Croatia at birth in 2015 was 77.5 years, and it has increased up from 74.6 years in 2000. In this severe population aging era, if older people live longer but not in a healthy manner, caring for them will place an extreme burden on themselves, their families, and society. The physical activity attributes to physical and psychological health, functional ability and general quality of life in old age, but still relatively small number of elderly is regularly involved in physical activates. The goal of this paper is to investigate perceived facilitators and barriers for elderly involvement in physical activities. Literature have been searched on physical activity and aging, with an emphasis on motivating factors and barriers for elderly involvement in physical activity. Predictors influencing the elderly involvement in physical activities are numerous and can be divided into several groups. Some groups are personal, social, and environmental factors. Personal factors include health, motivation, time factor, knowledge about exercise, self-efficacy or confidence, feelings and perception about exercise, body image and fear, social factors can be a lack of social support, family and household commitments, work commitments and community commitments and environmental factors are poor built environment, access to programs and facilities, safety concerns, traffic, transportation and costs. These factors either can positively or negatively affect the decision of an elder to engage in and to continue with the engagement in physical activity. Significant differences have been observed in predictors influencing the involvement of elderly in physical activity between urban and rural elderly populations, conditioned by the accessibility of physical activities programs. Despite the knowledge of the positive effects of physical activity on individual health, a relatively small number of elderly are nowadays involved in organized physical activity programs. By identifying positive or negative predictors to the involvement of elderly in organized physical activity programs, the potential to make a positive impact on the same will be possible. The involvement of a larger number of elderly could have multiple positive effects, as well as for the elderly as for the society as a whole.

Elderly, physical activity, predictors, facilitators, barriers

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