Highly competitive team sports in school discourage many children from taking part in extracurricular physical activity and undermine efforts to curb Britain's record teenage obesity rates, a study suggests.

Under the national curriculum, secondary schools are supposed to use PE lessons to teach children how to lead physically active lives with the aim of promoting lifelong participation in healthy exercise.

The report suggests that non-competitive lifestyle activities, such as aerobics, Pilates, hill walking, stretching and toning routines should be encouraged. Even videos such as Supersize Me, which underlines the dangers of excessive consumption of junk food, are recognised as a valuable part of the PE lesson.

The study of more than 100 secondary schools found that too many PE teachers, particularly men, still emphasised the importance of competitive team sports at the expense of more individual activities.

Laura Ward, a lecturer in PE and sport pedagogy at Loughborough University and author of the report, said that the results could be disastrous for pupils who did not excel at team sports. “Many pupils are turned off by PE lessons and are not developing healthy exercise habits,” she said.

The problem had little to do with the idea that competitive sport was bad because it was divisive. It was simply that children who were not good at sport needed to be encouraged to find exercise they enjoyed.

For the study, to be presented at the annual conference of the British Educational Research Association in Edinburgh today, Ms Ward and her colleagues questioned 112 PE teachers throughout England. They found that the vast majority viewed health-related exercise as a valuable part of the PE curriculum but many had a narrow view of what healthy exercise involved and a poor understanding of how they should promote it. The worst offenders included teachers who devoted the whole lesson to team sports, claiming that the warming-up and cooling-down sessions covered the healthy exercise requirement.

Next came the drill sergeant types, who required pupils to perform fitness tests such as sprints, strength trials and “sit and reach” exercises.

Equally unhelpful were those who relied too heavily on bleep tests, which require pupils to run continuously between two points. The runs are synchronised with a pre-recorded tape, which plays beeps at intervals. As the interval between each successive beep reduces, those who cannot keep up have to drop out.

“At the end of five minutes, you have a super-fit child running on their own, while the unfit kids - the ones who really need some exercise - are sitting on the floor and have lost all interest,” Ms Ward said.

She said that because most PE teachers had been successful at team sports they were often unable to appreciate that any other form of exercise might be beneficial to others, leading to “a persistent cycle whereby sport is privileged within PE and health-related exercise is marginalised”.

The report comes as the Government is encouraging competitive sports before the 2012 Olympics. Kevin Brennan, the Children's Minister, said yesterday that £30 million will be invested in competitive sport in schools in the next three years.

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