Children's Fitness - Part 2

In Part 1, I wrote about some promising new trends in school physical education (PE) programs. In general, there has been a trend away from group sports, substituting activities such as rock climbing, tai chi and weight lifting - activities that every child can participate in at some level. There is also an increased emphasis on learning skills that can lead to greater physical activity beyond school.

Part of this shift includes a greater emphasis on cardiovascular endurance and in some school PE programs, students wear heart-rate monitors and are graded by how long they stay in their target range.

Promoting cardiovascular fitness is fine as far as it goes, but this kind of grading system has a serious flaw in that it both mirrors and reinforces the preoccupation of most adult fitness programs with the quantity of activity activity performed, rather than the way participants use their bodies while performing those activities. We tend to be interested in how many laps we swam, the amount of weights we lifted, or the speed of our runs rather than how well we used our body in performing those sports. In other words quantity rather than quality.

To see what this leads to, take a look at any group of runners or joggers. You will probably see tight necks, hunched shoulders and painful expressions on many of their faces. These runners may be getting a cardiovascular workout, but in the process they're putting a lot of unnecessary and harmful pressure on their bodies. No wonder so many people who begin fitness programs drop out after a few weeks, often due to pain or injuries.

Of course it's important that children engage in vigorous physical activity; we don't want them to grow up to be couch potatoes. But making "effort" the primary basis for grading students - even if it's as easy as reading a heart monitor - does our children a great disservice.

What makes this particularly sad is that we now know how to help people improve their movement quality. The twentieth century saw the development of numerous somatic therapies and teaching methods that have proven effective in helping people of all ages perform all their activities, from everyday ones like walking and using a computer right through to vigorous sports, with greater ease, efficiency and safety.

The method I know best, first as a student and then, for the past twenty years as a teacher, is the Alexander Technique. It has a long history of helping people with stress-related conditions like back pain and stiff necks and shoulders and it is often used by musicians, dancers and actors to improve the quality of their performance.