Uncovering the Past: Monitoring and Promoting Physical Activity and Fitness across the Lifespan Using 20th-Century Data

Throughout the 20th century, various efforts were made to assess and promote physical activity and fitness across different populations. While contemporary data on physical activity and health trends are abundant, historical data, spanning school fitness tests, workplace wellness programs, national surveillance studies, military conscription records, and community health campaigns, remains significantly under-analyzed. These legacy datasets offer a rich, untapped source of insight into generational shifts in behavior, early public health interventions, and foundational benchmarks for fitness standards. Analyzing such data may reveal long-term trends, socio-cultural dynamics, and missed opportunities that are still relevant today.

This Research Topic seeks to rediscover and analyze historical data related to physical activity and physical fitness collected throughout the 20th century. We invite scholars to submit manuscripts that mine these datasets for patterns, trends, and correlations, across all age groups, to better understand how physical fitness and public health evolved over time. The goal is to enrich our understanding of health behavior trajectories and inform more contextually grounded approaches to today’s public health and physical activity promotion strategies.

We invite contributions that utilize data collected between 1900 and 1999, focusing on all age groups (children, adolescents, adults, and older adults), including but not limited to:

• Retrospective analyses of physical fitness tests, school or university archives, military fitness data, national health surveys, and community programs;

• Comparisons of historical vs. contemporary physical activity and fitness levels;

• Methodologies for digitizing and interpreting analog or early digital datasets;

• Socio-demographic analyses based on age, gender, region, and socioeconomic status using legacy data;

• The evolution of physical activity guidelines and their historical impacts;

• Reports on early health promotion campaigns, school curricula, or public policies related to fitness; and

• Contributions that reveal trends in sedentary behavior, health disparities, or early prevention efforts. All submissions should clearly contextualize their historical data and highlight the relevance of their findings to modern health research, policy, and practice.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Classification
• Clinical Trial
• Community Case Study
• Curriculum, Instruction, and Pedagogy
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Classification
• Clinical Trial
• Community Case Study
• Curriculum, Instruction, and Pedagogy
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Policy Brief
• Review
• Study Protocol
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: Historical physical activity data, Fitness trends, Public health interventions, Socio-demographic analysis, Legacy datasets

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.