How important are extracurriculars for the UK universities

[marinad]

Hey, I live in a country where almost no university pays attention to your extracurriculars. There's only one that focuses a lot on your volunteering certificates and stuff like that from what I've heard. Because of this, I know very little about extracurriculars and want to know how important they are for applying to UK universities, and I'm not even sure I fully understand what extracurriculars are lol. Is it important to do volunteering work(there aren't a lot of opportunities with certificates in my country) or should I focus more on my hobbies? Also, how am I supposed to kinda prove to a university that I did an extracurricular activity? For example, I did skateboarding for a while and made the first magazine issue about skateboarding in my country, how do I write about this in my application? 

[Gaby]

You should focus on things that you can relate to the degree you're applying for in your personal statement. You also don't need certificates, they won't be checking that, there's no space in the application to submit them anyway. Doing extracurriculars just for the sake of it is not what UK universities want to see. They wan tot see that you know about the degree you're applying for, have done something around it in your spare time, and that you have the skills you need to be a successful student.