The relationship between demographic variables, physical exercise practice and perception of the body image of undergraduate student teachers

The aim of this study was to determine whether physical exercise improves the body image of Spanish undergraduate student teachers and whether there are differences by age, gender or specialty. The online version of the Body Shape Questionnaire (BSQ), which assesses body dissatisfaction and concern with weight, was applied to a sample of 70 university students specialising in pre-school and elementary teaching at an Andalusian university The demographic variables used were weekly hours of voluntary physical activity, age, sex and area of concentration. The internal consistency of the questionnaire was very satisfactory. Testing for normality and homoscedasticity indicated that the data was not parametric. The results obtained by performing the Mann-Whitney U test and the Spearman correlation test show that university students who do physical exercise have a better perception of their body image than those who do not exercise:; males have a better perception of their body image than females and spend more hours per week doing sports, and elementary education students have better perception of their body image than pre-school education students and also spend more hours per week doing physical exercise.