According to the U.K. Sports Medicine Research Institute, less than 13% of high school girls in Kentucky are getting the recommended levels of physical activity.

Active Girls Healthy Women is a UK initiative that started in 2018, aiming to equip girls with the skills and confidence to lead physically active lives well into adulthood.

More in today's medical news.

Why?

Every day the mission of active girls, healthy women is to advance girls in women's physical activity and health through research and outreach.

We know that physical activity is a really important component of leading an active and healthy lifestyle, and unfortunately, beginning as early as preschool, we see that girls have lower physical activity levels than boys, and that trend continues throughout the life span by middle school.

75% of girls are not getting enough physical activity, compared to about 64% of boys.

Everyone knows about numeracy and reading literacy, but we think a lot about physical literacy, building those foundational skills that kids need to be active for a lifetime.

When you think about kids playing, they're running, they're jumping, they're throwing, they're kicking.

And if you can move your body in a lot of different ways, then you're more likely to feel confident in picking up all kinds of different activities later in life.

So when they're young adults and their friends say, Hey, let's go try pickleball, or let's go try swimming, that if they've had those foundational skills, that they may be more likely to say yes to those activities.

Outreach usually is a partnership between schools and community members with expertise in in exercise or movement in some way.

There's a group out there called Learning the Ropes, and Kaylie Woodard and her husband, Nick Woodard, are world champion jump ropers.

They live right here in Kentucky.

And so when we're in western Kentucky working with the school, we always see if they can come in and teach them jump roping with the kids because there's nothing we love more than to have a community member from the community we're serving to teach kids in that school about a new form of activity.

There are a lot of barriers of escape activity for women, and and one of those barriers, significant barriers, is having an injury.

So even if we're able to get girls playing sports, they are experiencing injuries in some sports at higher rates than than boys.

That's one of the things we think about as a program is it's not only less about the prevention of the injury.

There's lots of people doing great work there, but more about how do we get women through and beyond when they do experience that injury to an active lifestyle for the rest of their lives?

Movement is for everyone, but not every movement is for everyone.

So you have to find the one that works for you and you have to find something you enjoy because we will not stick with things we don't enjoy.

So the one message I would share is that if someone finds themselves feeling like moving is a punishment, stop, Find something else.

There are too many ways to move our body to have movement feel like a punishment.

One of the program's new initiatives is their coffee talks, virtual education sessions, where girls and women can get quality information about leading an active lifestyle.

The next coffee talk is August 23rd.