Strengths and limitations
HOLIDAYS, HOLIDAY
Key strengths of the current study are its longitudinal design spanning two school years. Furthermore, it used the highest quality measures of fatness and fitness possible for collection in a school setting. Relatively few studies of children’s summer holiday fatness and fitness have been conducted outside the US, and none in the southern hemisphere or in countries with relatively short summer holidays, meaning this study makes a highly valuable contribution to the international literature.Limitations must also be acknowledged. The COVID-19 pandemic commenced approximately halfway through data collection. This led to some data loss (because some schools wouldn’t permit data collection visits to go ahead) and also likely contributed to participant dropout, which was considerable. This is likely to have negatively affected the study’s power, and may also impact the generalisability of findings. Finally, we chose to study children across Year 4 and 5 on the basis that they were older enough to reliably complete fitness tests, and so that the likelihood of them changing schools would be minimised (children attending government schools in South Australia transition to high school at the end of Year 6, though a considerable portion choose to transition to private schools for high school, with many transitioning at the end of Year 5). However, we acknowledge that children’s bodies change rapidly at this age, which may make it harder to detect summer-holiday-related changes in fatness and fitness. Changes across the 2-year period are overlaid on expected age-related changes in growth and development. At this age, %BF increases on average by 0.3–0.8% p.a [