Only 1 in 3 students can run without losing breath, reveals survey

Sportz Village EduSports, India's leading school sports organisation, released the findings of its landmark 14th Annual Health Survey (AHS) 2026 on Friday.

Spanning 1,41,840 children across 333 schools in 112 cities, the report delivers evidence-based insights into post-COVID fitness recovery, the decisive impact of structured Physical Education (P.E.), and persistent health gaps that demand urgent systemic action.

Launched in 2010, the Annual Health Survey has become India's definitive barometer of children's physical health.

The 14th edition assesses seven key parameters including Body Mass Index (BMI), Aerobic Capacity, Anaerobic Capacity, Upper Body Strength, Lower Body Strength, Core/Abdominal Strength, and Flexibility.

Two out of every three school-going children in India cannot sustain basic cardiorespiratory activity. Aerobic fitness is the single strongest predictor of lifelong cardiovascular health, and its absence in childhood is a direct pipeline to adult diabetes, hypertension and heart disease.

Across all schools, this is the most alarming and most stubborn deficit the survey has tracked in 14 years.

Alongside this, 40% of children fall outside a healthy BMI range, a figure that has barely shifted across three years of post-COVID recovery (59.1% healthy in 2023; 59.6% in 2025), confirming that body composition responds to sustained lifestyle change far more than to school PE alone.

Beyond that, 49% of children fail to meet the upper body strength benchmark and 44% fall short on lower body strength, gaps that point to a generation that is sedentary, screen-bound and physically underprepared.

Saumil Majmudar, Co-founder, CEO & MD, Sportz Village, said, “This year's findings rearm something we have always believed - healthy childhoods are intentionally built! At a time when children are facing rising lifestyle-related health risks and growing emotional pressures, building healthy habits early has never been more important. Schools play a critical role by designing structured opportunities for movement, but lasting impact comes when families and communities support the same environment. As a country, we must continue to track and understand children's well-being at scale, so that we can respond meaningfully and collectively. The opportunity before us is clear - to act with intent today and create healthier, happier childhoods for the years ahead.”

The COVID Crash and the Comeback

In 2020, before the pandemic, 70.5% of students met overall fitness benchmarks. By 2022, after two years of school closures and sedentary lockdowns, that number had crashed to 56.2%. It was the sharpest fitness decline ever recorded in the survey's 14-year history.

The good news is that the children bounced back. As schools reopened and structured activity resumed, fitness climbed steeply reaching 84.4% in 2024 and 84.8% in 2025, surpassing pre-COVID levels. But aerobic fitness it rose from just 27.5% in 2023 to 34.4% in 2025 making it the weakest parameter, with only incremental gains.

The survey's most decisive finding: students who stayed enrolled in a structured PE programme for two consecutive years improved their overall fitness from 66% to 82%, a 16 percentage-point gain in just two years.

Schools running more than 80 PE sessions annually recorded 86% overall fitness. The evidence is conclusive: structured, consistent physical education works. The question is why it is still not treated as essential.

Girls Are Fitter Than Boys

Girls outperform boys in five of seven fitness parameters: BMI (62% vs 57%), flexibility (73% vs 68%), core strength (88% vs 86%), upper body strength (53% vs 45%) and anaerobic capacity (65% vs 63%). This is an encouraging shift with the result of more inclusive PE programming in recent years.

But only 27% of girls have healthy aerobic capacity, versus 41% of boys, a 14 percentage-point gap that is the widest gender divide in the entire survey.

Girls are stronger and more flexible. They cannot run. If this aerobic deficit is not addressed through gender-responsive PE, it will quietly become a long-term health inequality.

Public School Children Are Fitter Than Their Private School Peers

Children in government and public schools outperform their private school peers in five of seven fitness parameters including aerobic capacity (40% vs 33%), anaerobic capacity (81% vs 62%) and flexibility (78% vs 69%).

The anaerobic gap alone is 19 percentage points. More daily movement, more outdoor time, less sitting are the advantages that outweigh infrastructure. Private schools lead only in upper body strength. For everything that predicts long-term health, public school children are ahead.

The data makes one thing clear that children’s health is a shared responsibility. Parents are the first line of defence - the food on the plate, the hour of outdoor play, the screen switched off at bedtime. But schools need to step up as much.

Children spend a third of their lives inside a classroom and that’s where structural, collective change can take place. The survey findings make it unambiguous that putting sport on a timetable is not the same as building fitness.

A game on the field is not a structured programme. What moves the needle as 14 years of data now proves is a deliberate, assessment-driven approach that tracks every parameter, develops every child, and is fiercely protected from being quietly bumped by an extra academic period.

India has the youngest population in the world. It also has some of the least active school children. Those two facts cannot coexist without a price.