Swiss students major in sport

Fitness sports such as aerobics are particularly popular with female students Keystone Archive

A new academic study suggests that Swiss university students are placing a high priority on sport and fitness.

The report, carried out by the University of Bern’s Institute for Sport and Sports Science (ISS), showed that around 96 per cent of university students in Switzerland are regularly engaged in some form of sporting activity.

“Encouraging”

“I think the findings are very encouraging,” institute director professor Kurt Egger told swissinfo. “Basically, around 60 per cent of the students we surveyed are using the sporting facilities offered by their universities, with the vast majority of the remaining 40 per cent taking part in some form of sport elsewhere.”

Although he did not have to hand the figures relating to other European countries, Egger insisted that Swiss students appeared to be much more sporty than their counterparts on the rest of the continent.

Of the four per cent of Swiss students who said they were not involved at all in sport, more than a third claimed that they didn’t have enough time while less than a quarter expressed a dislike of physical activity.

Gender divide

As for the actual types of sport practised by students, a clear gender divide can be seen with male students generally favouring team sports such as football and basketball and female students on the whole preferring dance and fitness based sports, such as aerobics.

“The first aim of this study was to gather data on this subject for the whole of Switzerland, something which had never been done before,” Egger added. “Now we have a good base from which all the universities can work in evaluating the success of their sporting programmes.”

by Mark Ledsom