Hábitos desportivos dos jovens do interior norte e litoral norte de Portugal

Sports habits of youth from Portugal north interior and coast Knowing the habits of free time of young people is extreme importance in order to meet their leisure activities and the role that sport plays in them. Due to a widespread notion that the practice of extra-curricular physi cal activity among young people tends to decrease, the question arose of what leads young people to practice or not practicing physical activity. There are already some studies on this issue that present results related to sports habits in the Portuguese population. However, due to the variety of social and cultural realities that exist in our country, we think that would be relevant study each of these different means. Given this, the main objectives of this work are the characterization of sport practice for young people of the North Interior and North Coast of the country and know about the factors that lead to not practice of young people of these two regions. For this study we consider: North Interior the municipality of Vila Real, Vila Pouca de Aguiar, Braganca and Vila Flor; North Coast the municipality of Guimaraes, Penafiel, Viana do Castelo and Vizela. The data from this study were collected in the year 2007 as part of several studies of graduate thesis, the questionnaires apply in these were validated by experts. The sample of this study consists of 1304 students with a mean age of 15,82 of which 572 (43.8%) are male and 732 (56.2%)Females. For this study used the descriptive statistics, including the frequency, the percentage, mean, standard deviation and to compare means, we used the Student t-test. From the analysis of the data collected we highlighted the achieve ments: the low level of practice in the two regions compared to the found in the European Community; lack of motivation indicated as the reason of not practice, either in North Interior, either in the North Coast, the Football being the modality most practiced by the sample in general, the adjusted and proper proportion of physical activity weekly, and the average duration per session practiced by the sample, the fact that in the North Interior the most common site for the practice being related to natural areas, such as the street and the nature, in the North Coast the preference goes to the club and adequate infrastructure for sport practice.