Physical activity, overweight and obesity in public service drivers in the city of Manizales, Colombia

Objective: To determine the level of physical activity, overweight and obesity of public service drivers in the city of Manizales, Colombia. Methodology: quantitative, correlational and cross-sectional research. Simple random probability sampling. A sample of 175 male subjects was obtained from three public taxi service companies. The analysis was carried out with the SPSS v.20 program for Windows. Descriptive statistics were calculated. To determine the relationship between nonparametric variables, the MannWhitney U tests, Chi-square and the Pearson correlation index were applied. For the comparison of means in the parametric variables the t-Student test was used with a level of significance of p≤ 0.05. Results: average age, 48.89 ± 16.64 years; average height, 1.68 ± 0.05 m, average abdominal circumference, 94.92 ± 9.0 cm and average body mass index, 27.51 ± 3.4 kg/m2 . Intense physical activity was carried out by 19.3%, moderate intensity physical activity was practiced by 27.8%, and low intensity physical activity was carried out by 36.4%, while 16.5% of drivers do not perform any physical activity. Conclusions: Taxi drivers have low levels of intense and moderate physical activitywhile low levels of physical activity have a higher prevalence. Drivers are characterized because they are 63% overweight and have a high abdominal circumference index with values similar to the national parameters.