PHYSICAL ACTIVITY AS A FACTOR DETERMINING HEALTH: SOCIOEDUCATIONAL ASPECTS

ES citizens' life expectancy has never been so long and it is still getting longer. Howe-ver, their health is far not as good as it could be. Unfortunately, there happen to be a lot of cases of illnesses and of early death, which could be prevented. Health is influenced mostly by social, economic and other living and working conditions. The questions associated with them are included into ES economic and social policy. Smoking, nutrition, physical activity, alcohol, people's attitude towards themselves and others have also a great influence on health. The main premature causes of death and disability are accidents and injuries, psychic disorders, cancer diseases, blood circulation disorders and respiratory diseases. It is obvious, that person's physical activity usually positively affects health. Good he-alth is a significant complex part of the life's quality. Active physical activity at leisure time enriches person's self-expression, reveals the content of new educative values, creates new behaviour and communication forms, develops the culture of motions. It means that it is very important to propagate the importance of physical activity, especially among the youth. On the other hand, it is also not less important to know different society group opinion on this question. Thus, the aim of the carried out research is to investigate Lithuanian comprehensive school senior class pupils' opinions about healthy way of living. This article presents research results related with the physical activity problems. The research was conducted in January-February, 2011. 1256 Lithuanian comprehensive school 9-12 form pupils participated in this research. It has been stated, that physical activity concerns the greater part of the respondents. 64,3% of the respondents are in favour of this. One third of the respondents assert that they only partly care about physical activity. However, the research results show that boys are more concerned about physical activity than girls. Also, it has been stated, that boys pay more attention to additional physical activity than girls. Even 35,4% of boys allot more than 4 extra hours per week for physical activity while there are only 10,6% of girls who allot more than 4 hours. Senior class pupils allot the least amount of additional time to physical activity. Summarizing, we can assert that 9–10 form pupils are more active than 11–12 form pupils. More than one third (35,7%) of the respondents think that spreading of bad habits (e.g., smoking, using alcohol and so on…) have the greatest negative influence on pupils' health. A big learning load is in the second position. The respondents think that teaching programmes are overloaded. Basically, the respondents don't think that physical activity is a significant factor determining health's deterioration. The most important factors determining health's deterioration are bad habits and overloaded teaching programmes.