How I Would Change Gym Class
Gym class was not a great time for me.
To understand exactly how painful grade school PE was back in my day, you must experience “Go, You Chicken Fat, Go.” Back in early 1960s, PE was all about preparing for and passing the Presidential Fitness Test, which was JFK’s youth fitness standards. “Go, You Chicken Fat, Go” was a ridiculous song written expressly for the Presidential challenge and sung by a guy named Robert Preston. Every single day during PE class, we did calisthenics as it blasted over the PA system on repeat. We’d do pushups, jumping jacks, squat thrusts, chinups, all while listening to this masterpiece – I think I’m finally realizing why I hated strength training and gravitated toward long distance endurance events for the bulk of my youth! We occasionally got to play dodgeball, and those were good days. Head shots were allowed and even encouraged. No PC stuff anywhere.
My first year of high school gym was rough, too. You see, I placed out of a few of my classes, so they bumped me up to an all-senior PE class as a freshman. I actually don’t remember all that much about the PE curriculum. It might have been great, but I wouldn’t have known because I was too busy avoiding purple nurples and dodging rat tails in the locker room. Oh, and back then we had to shower during gym, so wet towels were exclusively used for rat tail production. Let’s just say that you really don’t know pain until you’ve felt a sopping wet rat tail inscribe itself across your lower ribcage. Fun stuff. Once spring track season rolled around, though, I was the top point man on the team, usually winning the mile and two mile, and placing in the pole vault. That got me some cred and made the rest of high school bearable.
But gym was never great for me.
So today, I’m going to explain what I’d change about gym class if I was given the chance to teach or administer it. I suppose the first thing I’d change about physical eduction in schools is to make sure it still exists! Standardized testing, and all the madness that surrounds and enables it, along with tight budgets, have forced schools to cut the “non-essentials,” including gym, music, and art. I’ve definitely got nothing against math, social studies, science, and English, but being active is just as essential as those subjects. Heck, even recess is getting cut in some places. That’s just criminal.
No, I’m not considering a new career path, and no, this isn’t a policy discussion. I’m not proposing comprehensive school reform (although that’s probably what it’d take to work). I’m just having fun. In the process, hopefully I outline some tangible activities you parents find helpful enough to try. The “revolution,” if there’s going to be one, must start at the local level. You start legislating education from afar and you end up with stuff like the “Go, You Chicken Fat, Go” song playing on repeat over an aging PA system and scaring an entire generation away from pullups. You can’t rely on that. You have to be the change you seek, whether that’s playing tag with your kids on weekends, banding together with other concerned parents for “PE meetups” outside of school, or putting pressure on your kids’ schools to make time for gym and recess. Maybe you could even be a PE teacher and start the change from the inside (though I don’t know how much freedom PE teachers get to construct their own programs).
If I was put in charge of leading gym class, I’d only employ competent coaches with athletic or training backgrounds. No more math teachers filling in because there’s no money to hire a dedicated coach. They’d have to be certified through something like NCSA, and there would be a lengthy interview process. All teachers would have to be physically fit themselves, able to perform and teach (including scaling up or down for all fitness levels) basic strength and conditioning movements, and be willing to go on record against Chronic Cardio (Ok, that last one’s a joke. Kinda.).
For grade school kids, I’d:
Abolish chairs. You ever see a kid squat? They do it effortlessly. Toes pointed forward, nice neutral spine, butt to calves, and they can sit there forever. They don’t need chairs at school. Desks are tall enough and the ground is perfect for sprawling out and getting work done. Yeah, this isn’t a gym class thing, but so what? It’s my post.
Instate a mix of free play and structured exercise, including:
MovNat. This is the prime time to teach kids to move naturally through the environment. Balance, climbing, crawling, jumping, all of it. Their joint mobility is unencumbered by years of sitting and sedentary living (because, well, they’ve only been alive for half a decade), so MovNat will come naturally (get it?). Erwan, you down for a career change?
Strength training once a week. A lot of bodyweight basics – pullups, pushups, squats, planks, overhead presses – plus some light weighted movements, like learning how to hip hinge to pick stuff up off the ground (deadlifts, basically, not for weight, but for the movement pattern). Most kids do this naturally, but that goes away pretty quick. This basic weekly refresher course would keep it. And no, strength training does not stunt growth.
Sprints once a week. Six or seven all-out sprints with a couple minutes of rest in between. Kids love to run and this is a great outlet for it.
Mile runs every week. If you can run a mile well, you’re in pretty good shape.
Field trips to the wilderness for long hikes. Maybe two or three times a month get kids outside for daylong hikes. Bring along the science teachers and make it educational! This would also be a great opportunity to teach MovNat fundamentals.
A fully outfitted jungle gym with the regular stuff – swings, ladders, multiple levels, slides – and not-so-regular stuff – rings, dip bars, horizontal bars, climbing ropes. Kids would learn how to climb, swing, and play on and around the equipment, maybe even with a gymnastics day every couple weeks, but there would also be free days. I’m thinking epic matches of hot lava monsters, personally.
Lots of free time, with the equipment and space (and some nudging if necessary) to do the following:
Dodgeball. It develops catching, dodging, throwing, spatial awareness, hand-eye coordination, agility, pain tolerance, with just enough healthy competition to teach you how to win and lose.
Tag. This will usually sprout up organically, but just in case it doesn’t, I’ll be “it” first.
Capture the flag. Teamwork, strategizing, sprints. The perfect fusion of brains and brawn. And, it’s super fun.
For high schoolers, I’d do much the same, with a few changes:
Push strength training to twice a week. Bodyweight exercises, employing all the essential movements, with the option to progress to weighted exercises if the student prefers. Just three or four compound exercises each session, two or three sets per. I doubt the school could stock enough barbells and weights for forty kids at once, so we’d have to use a lot of cheaper, more versatile equipment – sandbags, kettlbebells, medicine balls, slosh tubes. Imagine if everyone knew how to squat, deadlift, and press with perfect form that was ingrained at a young age?
Mobility work, daily, as a five to ten minute warmup. Teens are not quite as limber as kids, but far more mobile than most adults, so we can get ‘em before they stiffen up. I’d draw from MobilityWOD‘s trove of movements.
More MovNat.
Wrestling. I remember doing a bit of this in grade school PE. I wasn’t very good (too small and there were no weight classes), but it was fun. I could definitely see wrestling as a great way to teach kids practical self-defense. And wrestling makes for an interesting, visceral anatomy lesson.
Lots of play. Of course, I’d promote Ultimate as the, well, ultimate fun game for teens. Lots of running, jumping, changing directions, throwing, catching, predicting flight paths, orchestrating plays and generally having a blast. A kid who can learn the basic skills of Ultimate can probably play any sport with competency later in life. I’ll admit that I’m having a hard time imagining cynical teens playing without a shred of irony, but maybe if those same teens came up in my mythical grade school PE curriculum, they’d be different. Who knows.
It’s not about burning calories. I’m not overly concerned with seven year olds failing to engage in high intensity interval training or deadlifting their own bodyweight. Kids simply need to move. At their age, they need to jump, leap, and flail their arms as often as possible. They need to twist out of the way of an incoming rubber ball or classmate’s outstretched hand. Bruises, grass stains, and scraped knees need to be part of the normal curriculum, and I want to see some of the more arcane versions of tag unearthed and field researched by our youngest scholars. It is during childhood that the innate human need to move must be encouraged, rather than stifled, because it will set the tone for the rest of that child’s life. Look, kids pop out of the womb wanting to move and touch and grab and experience. You know how babies are always looking wide-eyed and amazed at everything? That’s because they are. And once they figure out how to clamber onto their two feet, they’re off climbing, running, waddling, and yes, falling to explore this interesting new world. We gotta keep that going!
I think my “program” would work (if competent teacher/coaches were widely available and lawsuits were rare) and it would help get kids off on the right track toward a lifelong appreciation of movement. At the very least, it’d be better than whatever we have now.
What do you think? Readers, parents, teens? Is my vision for PE pure fantasy without any real chance? Are things really as dire as I’ve been led to believe? If you could change something about gym class, what would it be? Let me know in the comment section.
As you may know, next Tuesday – just six days away – marks the official release of my new book, The Primal Blueprint 21-Day Total Body Transformation. It’s designed to walk you through, step-by-step, the first three weeks of going Primal, getting healthy, and taking control of the rest of your life. Since three weeks is a relatively short period of time, I worked hard for the better part of two years to iron out the details and make sure that it actually works. Well, it does, and I’m confident that this could be the bridge to break through to the mainstream. If you couldn’t tell already, I’m pretty excited. I’ll be releasing more details next week, but I’m gonna need your help. Are you with me?
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Posted By: Mark Sisson
I would like to see playground areas at middle and high schools. Monkey bars, chin up bars, swings, balance beams, ropes for climbing and swinging, etc. Why do we as a society insist that growing up means no time for play?
I love all this stuff and it completely supports what I have been moving towards for the last few years. As a PE department, we have purchased the indoor Patch, and the kids love it when we turn them loose on it. I have been fortunate in that I can create my own curriculum to meet the state standards and the International Baccalaureate scope and Sequence (blending and mixing them has been interesting). I’m hoping that my principal will get the school to fund (and hopefully other instructors) a weekenf at PrimalCon, or Exuberant Animal Jam, or even (holding breathe) a MovNat session.
Thank you Mark and to all of you have been posting here. You are making PE exciting for me again.
The schools are a mess. My nephews/nieces PE teacher made kids to calisthenics(on hot blacktop and some sandbag training. Many parents were outraged and banded together to get him fired. The blacktop I could see as a problem but making their kids stronger makes me think WTF. In other wtf news some schools share a PE teacher thus must keep track of 1000s of kids skills abilities,names, etc. Other schools allow the homeroom teacher to administer PE, which ends up being another recess so, no skills/activities are learned/exposed to the child.
Coming from a PE/Kineseology degree here is one view point. PE is educating the kids on health, wellness,and physical skills.(I suppose in groks world it would be akin to teaching kids weapons/fighting skills for instance.) Recess is where they get to play and explore more freely(though uber safe playgrounds reduced some levels of exploration).
Perhaps the question should be, “What can I/We do to improve the quality of physical education programs of our youths?”
I’m a martial arts instructor and we do races and all sorts of games here at the school. One of the favorite games is a game we call Ninja Wars which is a version of dodgeball with pool noodles. There are many many pool noodles instead of just one ball. It’s so much fun. Games like that should be played often and not just by kids.
Nothing like an ex-Marine teaching PE to grade-schoolers to take all the fun out of it…This was the late 1950′s–all we did was regimented calisthentics drills and get yelled at. I was absolutely miserable, and it essentially warped me for years against any sort of physical activity. Until I discovered Primal Blueprint!! Now I actually look forward to moving hard and playing whenever I can. I hope more schools institute at least some of Mark’s suggestions so that kids won’t have to go through what I did.
Amazing work. My elementary school had no PE, but being montessori, we were outside for at least an hour and a half for lunch and then recess. Teachers would have to force us to sit and eat our food before we could run off, swing, jump rope, play tug of war, or try and shove eachother off of balance beams.
In high school I didn’t have PE, and I didn’t have recess, and we didn’t have extracurricular sports – private school arts kids don’t need to exercise! If we’re going to sincerely fight the sedentarism epidemic, we need to quit cutting physical activity programs and instead maintain and actually improve them….I forsee Wall-E-esque devolving unless we do so.
I thought Chicken Fat was a special torture reserved for my classmates and I at our all girls Catholic high school! Oh, how I hated PE. Half the year was spent doing Chicken Fat and the other half was spent playing volleyball.
Please don’t call PE teachers “Coach.” Coaches stereotypically love their specialized sport (football, basketball, etc), are competitive, and teach PE (their REAL job) so they can coach (their preferred job). Kids who are small for their age, who lack natural affinity for movement skills and/or who don’t want to sweat or compete, etc. do not get the attention they deserve. Activities that can include all kids through the whole spectrum of ability are the best. Some of your suggestions fill the bill. “Coaches” don’t have time (or desire) to plan these activities.
BTW: dodgeball is an exclusionary activity. Notice who usually gets “out” first – pretty much the same kid(s) all the time. Time how long a lot of the children just stand. The game is great for those who last the longest, are aggressive enough to grab the ball, and have the ability to do so. The others are left “out.”
I wish gym class had been that cool! My school had pregnant girls that walked around the track and of course dodge-ball once a week – my whole reason for existing
Mark:
All great ideas. I completely agree.
In some pockets of the world (like mine), I’m quite sure that ideas like these, if adopted, would have to be blended in with other interests, namely, preparing kids for team play in organized sports.
‘Round here, skill building for them starts in the early grades, to make kids ready teams when they’re old enough. Like most things, there are good ways to go about it, and not so good ways. Boring kids with drills isn’t the way, in my mind. but there are ways to make skill building fun, especially if the curriculum also allows for the things you propose – which are so great for the whole child, not just the competitive/team member part of the child.
My point, for my neck of the woods anyway, is that your good ideas would have to be combined with what’s already here, namely, – a focus on preparation for team sports (which, as we well know, would be beautifully augmented with some primal stuff).
Great post. I hope it travels far and wide – like say, in viral video form, of kids actually doing this kind of movement in school – so decision makers could visualize it. Taking it further, I think ideas like this would be an easy sell if it could actually be demonstrated that stronger school teams are built with primal underpinnings.
Susan
I loved PE. I hated the classroom, so PE or as we called it in grade school, “recess” was great. There was no structured anything. We got 20 minutes to go out of that hated classroom and do any activity we wanted. Of course I went to school in the 1940′s, and it was a different world then.
Here’s a wrinkle I’d like to see address in more detail and length:
I was very ill as a preschooler, and when I was nearing kindergarten I was also relearning how to walk. This early experience taught me a weird mix of graceful movement and a fear of overexertion. For the rest of my growing up, I was the one with “no stamina.”
Oddly enough, I adored playing kickball at recess (and was really good at it), and I fit into the ballet lessons held on Saturdays in the school gym just like they’d been made for me … but I loathed P.E. with a passion that swirled around the slightly sadistic and always contemptuous teachers, but I walked everywhere.
Long, long distances. I never thought of that as “exercise,” and I loved it. Lanky legs, good lungs, and long distance silences. I don’t even remember being winded, except for the time I took a very little nephew with me and had to haul him on my back on a very hot day. THAT is what I want back – the ability to walk forever.
So what of the kids who, like me, don’t trust their own bodies when they’re little? How would you do all the stuff in the list for kids who know (from experience and from their parents’ ongoing opinion of the matter) that they’re not strong? How do we show them a better version of themselves?
Mark is right – the most essential thing that gym class is usually missing is simple FUN. Gym should be more like recess than football practice.
Our kids should be associating physical activity with POSITIVE feelings so that they look forward to getting out of the classroom or off the couch. Let’s take gym outside!
Wouldn’t you have to have gym class in the first place to be able to change it? Where I’m from you’d be hard pressed to find a school that offered anything close to resembling a legitimate PE class.
I guess you wouldn’t be surprised when you saw all the staggeringly overweight children running…er…laying around. The parents are not better though.
I have to plug British Bulldog.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_bulldogs_%28game%29
We used to set up our own games of this during breaks. It remains one of my treasured memories of primary school.
That sounds better than what they do up here. My sister just told me that they made a pansy version of basketball.
Basically it’s basketball but you aren’t allowed to steal the ball. So the teams always stay tied.
What really pisses me off about this is my sister is stronger than her classmates and she can’t show it off. That’s only going to last until the boys get their testosterone buff.
The biggest problem I have with my kids’ school Phys Ed class is scheduling. Phys Ed is considered a ‘special’. Two ‘specials’ are taught each trimester, so instead of the kids being taught that movement is something that should be done daily, they’re taught that it’s something that should be done for two months and then forgotten. I think it would be much more effective if each class went to phys ed for twenty or thirty minutes at least every other day, started moving as soon as they walked in the gym and stopped when it was over. I think the school would have fewer disciplinary issues too, but that’s just my opinion from watching my son – if he doesn’t get to run around like a maniac for at least a half hour a day, he’s a terror.
Though I did enjoy the games more than “strength training” periodic standardized testing. What sucked about this was you really did no do anything the rest of the year to ever get better at these. I mean scooting around on your butt with a board with wheel casters playing tag fill some time but doesn’t really make me any more fit.
This one really spoke to me Mark. I’m a father of 2, a RKC, and a fire fighter paramedic. The need to move well and more often is a constant theme in my daily life.
My children so me what unrestricted mobility and athletic ability is all about.
I work hard trying to get my students back to their primal roots.
Every time the alarm at the station rings, I’m faced with the horrors of what sedentary, unhealthy life choices can do to a person.
Since I became a RKC, I’ve been struggling w/ my role in this war. It wasn’t until a recent conversation with my wife that I realized that a physical education class room may be where I’m needed.
Anyway, just something I’ve been pondering. Thanks for inspiring a little more on this subject. BTW, check out the video below by Dr. Ed Thomas he’s the “Bruce Lee” of physical culture and fitness history. Smartest guy on the planet? I’d say yes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_-gTzrqMiE
amazing article, just what i was looking for! brings back memories too!
Great post Mark!
This is so relevant in most modern schools today that it makes me sad to think of the subject. I’m from Norway and, all dough we are not quite at this level of bad PE education, we are slowly following the US trends there.
For almost six-months now (going on a year) I have been working as a sports volunteer in southern Africa, and it is truly alarming to see how fast they are moving away
Great post Mark!
This is so relevant in most modern schools today that it makes me sad to think of the subject. I’m from Norway and, all dough we are not quite at this level of bad PE education, we are slowly following the US trends there.
For almost six-months now (going on a year) I have been working as a sports volunteer in southern Africa, and it is truly alarming to see how fast they are moving away from their fantastic and incredibly beautiful ways of movement, like dancing and play, in “advantage” of the western recipe of PE and creational movement.
I daily encounter PE teachers who complain on having to little equipment to execute high tech western ways of training, even dough they have vast grass fields for play or dance.
This PE-revolution cant come quick enough if you ask me =)
I invite you to come and play in my P.E. classes. I teach grades 3-5. Classes are 45 minutes and there is no sitting! Warm ups are self guided and include a mix of aerobic, strength, agility and sprint activities. Kids do wall balls and box jumps and love it. We always have game play and dodgeball is still a favorite. There is so much brain-based learning in P.E. and it makes them better math students.
more: http://www.exuberantanimal.com/
otherwise a good plan
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I would love to have seen these things in school. Perhaps I’d have even gone so far as to actually enjoy it. Too long have several of these things been such an embarrassment.
“Alright kids, do some pull ups.”
“But I can’t do even one…”
“I’m sorry to hear that, but you must get over here and embarrass yourself to prove it to me.”
Not fun in the least.
Unfortunately, I don’t see this going over too well in the current state of things. There are more overprotective parents now-a-days. To not end up in a potential law-suit, a lot of schools are succumbing to their demands. It’s a real shame.
Awesome article. I couldn’t agree more with what it states. I always hated having to sit in chairs all day, and I still do. It turns out I wasn’t A.D.H.D.; I was anti sit in a chair all day. Keeping the “inner child” alive with a more playful approach to exercise has kept me in far better shape than my former classmates; which is sad for them considering we’re in our 20′s.
Wow, I love these ideas. I teach a bunch of ten year olds who LOVE getting out in the sun and who choose to work on the ground instead of at their desks half the time. I think I’ll use some of these (I was already encouraging them with sprints and climbing) with them next term! Thanks!
I notice in the video, there are no overweight kids…How our diet has changed.
I am an elementary PE teacher and you are onto something here Mark. I presently co-teach with another PE teacher and our styles in teaching differ so much. I sometimes feel as though I get the “slacker” label because I believe in the “showing & doing” model of physical activity. PE in Georgia is entrenched in these Learning Standards that must be taught—this is where we (my teaching partner and I) differ—I see PE as a time to explore movement and activity- to “get it” through doing it in a less restricted way. We may be doing a unit learning to use a racket- she wants to do tedious drills and correct every mistake- I want to show them the best way and let them go at it. Figure it out with my guidance as I see them struggling. Now let me say this: She is doing EXACTLY as she has been taught in college…and I was taught to teach this way as well. But it took all the fun and learning out of it- I watched my first PE classes become these tedious, pressured experiences for the kids. No association of fun to activity there
So I reflected on how I learned to do all these athletic thing and guess what- it was all through doing and figuring it out. Yeah, I cover all our so called LEARNING STANDARDS, but really the kids teach themselves if we leave them alone and let them. Cheers