Elinor Barker: 'Enjoy sport and don't worry about your weight' says Olympian

Olympic gold medallist Elinor Barker has said that it's more important to help kids find a sport they love rather than monitoring their weight.

The cyclist's comments come following suggestions from health experts that children should be weighed following lockdown over fears of obesity, due to a lack of any PE lessons.

Barker pointed out that there are hundreds of sports out there and not everyone just likes the mainstream ones done in PE lessons: "I think a lot of kids don't like PE because there's a lot of hand-eye co-ordination involved".

"You need to be able to enjoy exercise and build it into a healthy lifestyle, you need to find something you love", she added.

Barker - who won a cycling gold medal at the 2016 Rio Olympics - believes it's more important to work with kids to identify sports they will love.

She said young people who don't enjoy sports like football and rugby should be introduced to less-accessible sports like "canoeing or badminton or rock climbing".

Barker was speaking in response to comments from the head of the National Obesity Forum's Tam Fry who said children should be weighed in September at school and again in the spring.

He said it would help identify and pick up signs of health problems at an early stage.

He said he was "absolutely sure" obesity rates would rise following months in lockdown where children haven't had access to regular monitored PE lessons.

"Sport needs to be a lifestyle as diets don't work," Barker said in response.

"When a number becomes the most important thing, reason goes out of the window," she added.