The Association Between 24-h Movement Behaviours and Fundamental Motor Skills of Children With Intellectual Disabilities Based on Compositional Data Analyses.
Trade sitting for heart-pumping play and fundamental motor skills improve in elementary kids with ID.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Liu et al. (2026) watched 6- to 10-year-olds with intellectual disabilities for a full day.
They used waist accelerometers to record every minute the kids sat, walked, or ran hard.
Then they tested how well the same kids hopped, threw, and caught to score fundamental motor skills.
What they found
Kids who racked up more moderate-to-vigorous activity had better motor scores.
Kids who sat the most had the lowest scores.
The link stayed strong even after the team used fancy compositional stats that keep the day’s 24 hours fixed at 100 percent.
How this fits with other research
Griffith et al. (2012) saw the same pattern in children with cerebral palsy years earlier.
Their data hinted that better skills push kids to move more; Yang now shows the reverse is also true in ID.
Lee et al. (2024) warned that autistic adults inflate their own activity reports.
Yang side-steps that trap by trusting accelerometers, not recall, giving us cleaner evidence.
Why it matters
You can’t teach motor skills if the child never practices them.
Schedule short, active bursts—relay races, animal walks, playground circuits—between table tasks.
Each extra minute of breathing hard is a minute not spent sitting, and the data say those swapped minutes sharpen skill.
Track the swap with a cheap accelerometer; watch the skill sheets rise.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
OBJECTIVE: To explore the association between 24-h movement behaviours and fundamental motor skills in children with intellectual disabilities using compositional data analyses and to investigate the 'dose-effect' characteristics of the reallocation between 24-h movement behaviours and fundamental motor skills. METHODS: A cross-sectional study was conducted among 306 children with intellectual disabilities aged 6-10 years from 12 special education schools in Beijing and Jinan between 10 September 2023 and 27 March 2024. The ActiGraph GT3X+ accelerometer was used to estimate the amount of time spent in 24-h movement behaviours. The Test of Gross Motor Development-2 was applied to assess fundamental motor skills. The compositional isotemporal substitution was utilized to analyse the relationship between 24-h movement behaviours and fundamental motor skills. RESULTS: (1) After controlling the gender, age and intellectual disability level, MVPA of children with intellectual disabilities was positively associated with their FMS total score, locomotor skills and object control skills (βFMS = 7.70, βlocomotor = 3.68, βobject control = 4.01, all p < 0.01). Additionally, SB was negatively correlated with their FMS total score, locomotor skills and object control skills (βFMS = -5.40, βlocomotor = -2.00, βobject control = -3.39, all p < 0.01). (2) According to the 'dose-response' curves, the mutual substitution of MVPA and other movement behaviours had an asymmetric effect on FMS, while the mutual substitution of LPA and SB had a symmetrical effect on FMS among children with intellectual disabilities. Furthermore, it was demonstrated that replacing SB with MVPA had the best-improving effect on the FMS of children with intellectual disabilities. CONCLUSION: Special education school administrators, teachers, parents and guardians should consider 24-h movement behaviours as a whole and pay attention to their impact on children with intellectual disabilities. In the process of promoting FMS in children with intellectual disabilities, ensuring adequate sleep and trying to reallocate time from SB to MVPA and LPA may be effective methods.
Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR, 2026 · doi:10.1111/jir.70096