Despite evidence that these health benefits have been widely recognized by most of the population for decades (e.g., Martin et al., 2000), many adults (Guthold et al., 2018) and youth (Guthold et al., 2019) do not meet these recommended physical activity guidelines. Cardiorespiratory and musculoskeletal fitness, academic achievement, and cognition, pro-social behaviors, metabolic health, and overall mental health benefits of daily moderate or higher intensity physical activity are also well-established for children and youth (American College of Sports Medicine, 2016 Poitras et al., 2016 Ahn et al., 2018 Biddle et al., 2019). These benefits include, but are not limited to, reduced chances of all-cause mortality, heart disease, several cancers, obesity, type 2 diabetes, depression, and anxiety in the range of 30–40% (Warburton and Bredin, 2017). Regular physical activity, performed at a moderate-intensity or higher for 150 min or more per week, is associated multiple health benefits among adults (Rhodes et al., 2017). Finally, the review concludes with suggestions for future research using this operationalization of maintenance including measure development, tests of latency to reach the peak maintenance process, validating constructs critical to determining maintenance, exploration of the contextual and individual moderators of maintenance formation, and the development of an omnibus dynamic model of initiation, continuation, and maintenance in PA behavior change. Based on this definition, we propose a method of falsifiability hypothesis testing of theoretical constructs that may determine the maintenance process. We suggest that maintenance should not be considered an absolute state of behavioral performance (e.g., a stage), as some constructs that were critical to behavioral performance during initiation will still be critical during PA continuation. Based on this information, we suggest PA maintenance be operationalized as a process marked by a shift in the mechanisms of action determining behavioral performance, that engender greater perceived behavioral enactment efficiency. Relevant behavioral theories were parsed for references to maintenance or maintenance-specific constructs and constructs most likely associated with maintenance were overviewed from a recent systematic review. Our subsequent aims were to engage in a critical analysis of this literature to propose a working definition of PA maintenance followed by recommendations for future research. The purpose of this critical narrative review was to first overview the conception of maintenance and co-requisite theoretical constructs in theories used in PA research. This has likely impaired the advancement of theory and practice. A clear rationale can be made for promoting long-term regular physical activity (PA), yet despite some attempts to operationalize “maintenance,” no robust definition has been agreed upon, beyond arbitrary time frames of regular PA.
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