The finding is striking precisely because all of the children studied were already participating in organized community sport, a setting often assumed to nurture the building blocks of physical literacy. Fundamental movement skills, often abbreviated as FMS, encompass the basic locomotor and object-control abilities, such as running, jumping, throwing and kicking, that underpin virtually all later physical activity. Decades of research have linked strong motor competence in childhood to higher levels of physical activity, better cardiorespiratory fitness, healthier body weight and sustained participation in sport and recreation through adolescence and into adulthood. Conversely, children with weak motor foundations tend to withdraw from physical activities, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of inactivity and further skill delay that public health researchers describe as a downward spiral.

To measure motor competence, the team used PLAYbasic, one of the Physical Literacy Assessment for Youth tools developed in Canada, which involves direct observation of children performing standardized tasks rather than relying on parental or self-report. Each child was asked to run, hop, throw, kick a ball and hold a balance, with trained assessors scoring technique against developmental criteria. In addition to the skill assessment, children completed the Physical Activity Questionnaire for Older Children, a validated self-report instrument known as the PAQ-C, while parents and guardians provided proxy-reported information on moderate-to-vigorous physical activity, outdoor play, the mode of travel to school, parental education and participation in coached sport.

The statistical analysis centered on multivariable linear regression, a technique that allows researchers to estimate the independent contribution of each factor while holding the others constant. In the primary adjusted model, two variables stood out as significant predictors of total FMS scores: older age and participation in coached sport. Together with the other covariates, the model explained 47.8 percent of the variance in skill scores, a substantial proportion for research in this field, with an adjusted R-squared of 0.454. The association between age and skill is expected, since motor competence typically improves as children mature and accumulate practice. The independent effect of coached sport, however, is the finding with the clearest practical implications, because unlike age, it is a potentially modifiable characteristic that communities and policy makers can act upon.

One of the more technically interesting results concerned kicking. The researchers detected a significant interaction between age and gender for kicking performance, meaning that the estimated difference between boys and girls in this skill was not constant across the age range but grew larger among older children. This pattern suggests that gender-related gaps in object-control skills may widen during the middle childhood years, possibly reflecting differences in the types of sport activities, practice opportunities or social encouragement that boys and girls receive as they get older. The authors note that such interactions are important to document because averaged effects can mask diverging developmental trajectories that matter for intervention design.

Perhaps counterintuitively, physical activity levels did not hold up as significant predictors once other factors were accounted for. Both child-reported physical activity on the PAQ-C and parent proxy-reported moderate-to-vigorous physical activity were associated with FMS scores in simple bivariate analyses, but neither remained statistically significant in the fully adjusted model. This dissociation between being active and being skilled carries an important message: the quantity of movement a child accumulates may matter less for motor development than the quality and structure of that movement. Unstructured play, while valuable for many aspects of health, may not by itself provide the instruction, repetition and feedback that children need to refine techniques such as a mature throwing pattern or a well-coordinated kick.

The study fills a notable gap in the literature because most motor competence research has been conducted in large urban centers, and evidence from northern and small-city Canadian settings has been scarce. Geographic context can shape skill development in multiple ways, from the availability and cost of sport programs to the length and severity of winters, the distances families must travel to facilities, and the capacity of local organizations to train coaches. Prince George, the northern British Columbia city where the study took place, experiences long winters and serves scattered surrounding communities, conditions that can constrain year-round access to structured physical activity programming. Understanding how motor competence develops in such settings is essential for designing equitable interventions rather than importing models validated only in major metropolitan areas.

The work was carried out as part of the Physical Literacy for Communities initiative, known as PL4C, which was supported through the Healthy Canadians and Communities Fund of the Public Health Agency of Canada along with financial and in-kind contributions from Sport for Life and its partners. The researchers partnered with Engage Sport North, a regional organization that helped recruit participants and facilitated data collection, and they acknowledge the children, parents, student volunteers and research assistants who made the assessments possible. The study received harmonized research ethics approval through the British Columbia RISe system under protocol H22-01044, and written informed consent was obtained from parents or guardians before any data collection began.

For the authors, the central takeaway is that participation alone is not enough. Even among children already connected to community sport, motor competence clustered at the lowest classification levels, indicating that enrollment does not guarantee the developmental instruction and deliberate practice that skill acquisition requires. They argue that structured, developmentally appropriate opportunities for instruction and skill practice should be embedded within community sport programming, with particular attention to children who join programs late or who receive less coaching exposure. The significant role of coached sport in their models suggests that expanding access to quality coaching, especially in northern and smaller communities where such resources are often limited, could be a concrete lever for improving child motor development and, by extension, long-term physical activity and health.

The researchers are careful to frame their conclusions within the limits of the study design. As a cross-sectional analysis, the study captures a single moment in time and cannot establish whether coached sport causes better motor skills or whether more skilled children are simply more likely to stay in coached programs. The sample of 166 children, while adequate for the regression models employed, was drawn from a single city, and two-thirds of the participants were boys, factors that may limit generalizability. The authors call for longitudinal and intervention studies to clarify the causal relationships and to identify concrete strategies for supporting fundamental movement skills, motor competence and broader physical literacy in northern and small-city contexts. Until such evidence accumulates, the study stands as a warning that the assumed pipeline from community sport participation to physical literacy may be leaking badly, and that deliberate, well-coached skill instruction is the repair it likely needs.

Subject of Research: Fundamental movement skill competence among children aged 6 to 12 participating in community sport programs in a northern Canadian city

Article Title: Fundamental movement skills among children participating in community sport programs in a northern Canadian city: implications for equitable access and physical literacy development

Article References: Fundamental movement skills among children participating in community sport programs in a northern Canadian city: implications for equitable access and physical literacy development. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-026-29440-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12889-026-29440-4

Keywords: fundamental movement skills, physical literacy, motor competence, community sport, children, coached sport, physical activity, health equity, northern Canada, PLAYbasic, BMC Public Health, public health

The distinction matters because the two concepts are often grouped together in schools, sports programmes and public-health campaigns. Physical fitness is usually treated as a measurable set of bodily capacities: how far a child can jump, how quickly they can run, how long they can sustain exercise and how well they coordinate movement. Physical literacy is broader and more experiential. It includes whether children enjoy movement, believe they can participate, understand how physical activity fits into their lives and feel able to navigate social and environmental situations that encourage activity. Fitness is therefore largely an outcome-oriented, biophysical concept, whereas physical literacy is a process-oriented framework concerned with engagement and lifelong participation.

The researchers, led by Thibaut Derigny and François Potdevin, recruited pupils from five urban primary schools in France between September and November 2024. Of 633 children invited, 551 received the necessary consent and completed at least part of the assessment process. After 90 children were excluded because of incomplete fitness data, the final analysis included 461 participants—229 girls and 232 boys—with an average age of 7.92 years. The children completed the fitness tests and the physical-literacy questionnaire during the same two-hour physical-education session, under the supervision of teachers, a fitness-test coordinator and a member of the research team.

Fitness was measured using the Diagnoform-Kid protocol, a battery designed for children and widely used in French research. Muscular power was assessed with a standing long jump, speed by measuring how far each child could run in five seconds, endurance with a six-minute 20-metre shuttle test that alternated running and walking, and coordination with a hopscotch task. Each capacity was converted to a score on a 20-point scale. These tests do not measure every aspect of physical capability, but together they capture several core components of performance: force production, rapid movement, sustained cardiorespiratory effort and the ability to control movement.

Physical literacy was assessed with the French-adapted Physical Literacy in Children Questionnaire, or PLC-Quest. The instrument uses 30 pictures, each accompanied by a four-point scale ranging from “not at all like me” to “very much like me.” Twelve items measure the perceived physical dimension, seven the psychological dimension, four the social dimension and seven the cognitive dimension. The physical dimension reflects how children view their movement abilities, while the other dimensions address confidence and motivation, interaction with others and understanding of physical activity. The questionnaire has shown strong test–retest reliability in its French version, although it remains a self-report measure and therefore captures how children perceive themselves rather than providing an entirely objective assessment.

To examine the relationship between the two constructs, the team used structural equation modelling, a statistical approach that can estimate several relationships simultaneously while accounting for measurement error. In the first model, the four fitness tests were combined into an underlying, or latent, overall fitness score, and the four physical-literacy dimensions were combined into an overall literacy score. The association between those two latent variables was substantial: the standardized coefficient was 0.52, with a 95 percent confidence interval from 0.34 to 0.71 and a probability value below 0.001. The model fit the data well, with a Comparative Fit Index of 0.948, a Tucker–Lewis Index of 0.924, a root mean square error of approximation of 0.07 and a standardized root mean square residual of 0.072.

The overall association appeared in both sexes. Among girls, the coefficient linking fitness and physical literacy was 0.30; among boys, it was 0.49. Although the relationship looked stronger in boys, a formal comparison found no statistically significant difference between the groups. The researchers then moved beyond the global scores and modelled each fitness capacity against each physical-literacy dimension. Endurance, strength and speed were each positively associated with the physical dimension of literacy. The strongest of these links was with strength, with a coefficient of 0.22; endurance showed a coefficient of 0.14, and speed 0.11. Coordination, however, was not significantly related to the physical dimension after the other fitness capacities were taken into account.

Strength was the only fitness capacity associated with the psychological dimension of physical literacy, with a coefficient of 0.17. None of the fitness measures showed a significant relationship with the social or cognitive dimensions. That pattern is important because it argues against treating physical literacy as simply another name for motor performance. A child may be able to run farther or jump higher without necessarily gaining the social confidence to join a game, the cognitive understanding to identify opportunities for activity or the motivation to remain active when exercise becomes difficult. The apparent psychological benefit of strength may reflect greater confidence in one’s body, although the cross-sectional design cannot establish that becoming stronger causes higher self-esteem or motivation.

The findings also expose a measurement problem at the centre of the debate. The physical-literacy questionnaire asks children to evaluate abilities related to strength, speed and endurance, while the fitness tests measure those same capacities objectively. The correlation may therefore partly reflect agreement between what children can do and what they believe they can do, rather than a completely independent connection between physical fitness and a wider literacy construct. The researchers caution that the direction of the relationship remains unknown. Fitness may increase confidence and encourage participation, but children who are already motivated, confident and knowledgeable may also practise more often and consequently develop better fitness. The two processes could reinforce one another over time.

Coordination provides another warning against reducing physical literacy to standardized tests. The hopscotch assessment may capture a narrow form of coordination in a controlled setting, while movement coordination in real life depends on changing environments, other people and the demands of play or sport. A child’s ability to adapt movement to a moving ball, a crowded playground or a team activity may not be reflected by a decontextualized task. From an ecological perspective, motor skill emerges through the interaction between an individual and the opportunities offered by their surroundings. The absence of a statistical association in this study therefore does not mean that coordination is irrelevant to physical literacy; it may instead show that the chosen test did not capture the context-sensitive abilities that the broader concept intends to describe.

The authors place the results against a global backdrop of low physical activity among young people. The World Health Organization recommends at least 60 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity each day for children and adolescents, yet more than 80 percent of adolescents worldwide are reported not to meet that benchmark. Childhood is a critical period for establishing habits that can influence later physical and mental health, but simply prescribing more exercise may not be enough. Programmes that focus narrowly on performance can also produce negative experiences, particularly when children feel judged by timed runs, rankings or comparisons with peers. Earlier work cited by the researchers has linked some forms of fitness testing with reduced self-esteem or unpleasant feelings, suggesting that the way activity is taught may influence whether children continue participating.

For schools and public-health planners, the practical message is not to abandon fitness training but to place it inside a broader educational framework. Activities that develop endurance, strength and speed could be combined with opportunities for choice, cooperation, problem-solving and reflection. Children might learn how to adapt games to different spaces, support classmates with different abilities, understand the health effects of movement and identify forms of activity they find enjoyable. Such an approach would treat fitness as one resource that helps children participate, rather than as the complete definition of successful participation. It could also reduce the risk that physical education becomes a contest in which only the most capable children feel competent.

The study has several important limitations. It was conducted in five urban schools in one country and involved children between six and ten years old, so the results may not apply to rural populations, older children or adolescents. Its cross-sectional design provides a snapshot rather than evidence of cause and effect. Sixteen percent of the initially participating children were excluded because they lacked complete assessment data, potentially introducing selection bias. The fitness tests may not have elicited maximum effort from every young participant, and the PLC-Quest depended on children’s ability and willingness to describe themselves accurately. The researchers also note that the more detailed structural model was saturated, meaning it had no remaining degrees of freedom; its perfect fit indices therefore cannot be interpreted as proof that the model captures the true structure of the data.

Even with those caveats, the results offer empirical support for viewing physical fitness and physical literacy as complementary but distinct. Fitness appears most closely tied to the physical side of children’s self-perceived capability, with strength additionally linked to psychological confidence. The social and cognitive dimensions appear to depend more heavily on family support, peer and teacher relationships, learning opportunities and the environments in which children move. Future longitudinal studies will need to follow children over time to determine whether improvements in fitness lead to greater physical literacy, whether physical literacy drives later fitness, or whether the relationship is genuinely reciprocal. For now, the evidence suggests that the most promising route to lifelong activity is not simply producing fitter children, but helping them become confident, informed and socially supported participants in movement.