Study: More Gym + Nutrition Ed Doesn’t Slim Kids Down (And I Think I Know Why)

I’m a firm believer in exercise for the sake of fitness. However, as you point out, the organized fitness in kids’ lives isn’t as important as letting them go outside and have fun! Fitness sneaks in when you’re climbing trees.

On another note, I heartily agree that “obesity” in and of itself is not a problem for the majority of kids. I had chubby, active brothers, and they were far healthier than skinny kids that sat inside all day! Thanks for posting this link and discussion.

“fitness sneaks in when you’re climbing trees” – now THERE is a quotable quote!!!

PE does zip for health and fitness, and the older you get the less it does. At least in sixth grade we spent most PE periods playing class-vs-class (the two sixth grade classes) soccer, so there was an opportunity for spending the hour running around for the kids who were into it. With 30+ kids on a side, though, most of us just wandered around and talked all period and never got anywhere near the ball.

Once you get to junior high and high school, PE classes are overwhelmingly oriented toward competitive team sports, because the classes feed the teams and the teams feed college teams which feed pro teams. Which is great for the one in ten thousand (or whatever ridiculously high number) kids who actually make it all the way, who even want to, but for everyone else it’s pointless. Playing baseball doesn’t make you fit. Playing six- or nine-person volleyball doesn’t make you fit. Playing football doesn’t make you fit. Basketball is actually one of the better of the popular team sports for fitness, but that’s only a six-week unit out of the school year.

Check out the people you know who have office jobs but play in the company softball team. How many of them are pudgy and wheezy? Quite a few in my experience, and the ones who weren’t were the ones who worked out outside of softball practices and games. If just playing the game made you fit then pro players wouldn’t run or bicycle or lift weights, but they all do.

PE Classes do very little to encourage fitness, whether right then and there or lifelong. Heck, we actually had a “fitness” unit when I was in high school. The teacher talked about cardiovascular fitness and your target heartrate and about warming up and cooling down and cetera. Then as soon as the unit was over it was all out the window. If the same teacher said to go for a cross-country run (around the campus perimeter, over a couple of low hills), they meant run and if you walked it they yelled belittling remarks and often made you take another lap. Through junior high and high school I saw a lot of PE teachers bellowing at kids to “Go! Go! Keep running! Faster, faster! If you stop and walk you take another lap!!!” but I never once saw a teacher go up and take a kid’s pulse to see if maybe they already were doing the best they could, or the best they should.

PE is warehousing, even moreso than academic classes. The teachers don’t give a damn about anyone but the star athletes. Amazing how it changes when you get to college, where the students are free to drop the class if they don’t like it. [wry smile] I had great PE teachers in college. Our actual kids, though, are trapped with a bunch of frustrated athletes who assume every student who’s not a star athlete is a lazy, whining liar. Wow, that’s going to get kids enthusiastic about lifelong fitness! :/

Angie

I’ve always said it… it starts at home! It drives me nuts how schools try to educate the kids on healthy eating, send them home with a flyer about eating apples (and have little clip-art fruits and veggies to decorate the borders), and the parents proceed to say “that’s nice honey,” and load the grocery cart with soda, chips, twinkies, and processed meats.

Just go into the grocery store and start taking a look at what other people have. I find that 9 times out of 10, when you see an overweight adult with overweight kids, you see a cart full of stuff to keep them that way.

Start them off active and eating right, they’ll keep doing it. That’s simple human nature!!!

My kids were soooo bored with baseball/softball. Lenore, you’re completely right. They spent most of their time standing around. The only sport I’ve found where they are moving the whole time and get sweaty every practice is ice hockey. They skate hard up to 5 hours a week. Plus they play for 6 months out of the year. Most of their coaches play on adult leagues so the kids get to see them play which (hopefully) is showing the kids that this sport can be a life-long way to have fun and stay fit.

Jen, I hear you! I tried SO hard to pass the 50 yd dash in the 8 seconds or whatever it was it had to be run in, that I’d practice, even, and still, no dice. I felt like such a failure.

Great post! Angie, exactly right, all of it, and Jen, too: I was the best female athlete in my high school and could even outrun a lot of the guys, but I almost failed the Presidential Fitness test because I wasn’t doing my situps right–I’d never been taught the right way to do them so they were going to say I did *zero* in one minute instead of 60.

We homeschool, so my kids aren’t trapped in seats all day. They have ADHD, so when it just gets to be too much I can tell them to go have a run around the block or climb a tree and then come back. And they get to go to the park a whole lot more than most kids. They all do ballet at an internationally-respected pre-professional ballet school that works the tar out of the kids, quite literally, for anywhere from an hour a night (pre-ballet) to up to 5-6 hours a night (about to graduate). My daughter, who was not fat when she started, nevertheless went down a pants size while growing 2 inches her first semester there. My son didn’t, although he was putting more time in. Different metabolisms. Sometimes that’s a factor, too. A kid who was doing pushups, crunches, jumping, and controlled movement exercises around 16 hours a week, plus playing a couple of hours daily, and to still have a slight amount of pudge, who’s eating a good diet–that’s metabolism. I wonder how big he’d be if he *didn’t* have all that activity.

My report card always had a row of As and one D. I tried so hard to make that go away but I never could. I was fit too but totally hopeless at the stuff I was supposed to do.

Play outside – lots. Solves the whole problem really when it comes to fitness.

viv in nz

I’m thinking about my “Kids” – all 700 of them. What are other school’s policies abut kids playing on the playground outside of hours.

The school next to my sister actually encourages it. My campus is of 2 minds. We want our kids to have a save place to play. There are studies that say encouraging community use during off hours decreased vandalism. We haven’t had our new basketball hoops stolen. We did have the building broken into 2 years ago and this summer.

We have a problem with dangerous litter being left on the playground also.

The dirty secret of child rearing is that are schools can’t do it. this especially includes instilling a healthy lifestyle in our children. I suppose some physical activity during school is better than none all day but its too irresponsible to expect our schools to provide the solution (healthy kids). Heck most schools barely get the educating part right, but I digress. Letting your kids run outside will go a long way to alleviating their “ADHD” and other such ailments.
p.s yes I know ADHD etc is legit, but i’m of the opinion that in many cases the kid just needs to play more.

According to various research studies, some of which I look a little askance at because of obscure methodology, the average child in the U.S. today consumes as many as 4 sweetened sodas a day.

Judging by my local 7-11 around 3:30, when I take my afternoon caffeine jolt, the number of 48-ounce sodas sold is tremendous.

This potentially adds about 800 calories to a diet on a daily basis, to say nothing of the impact of high fructose corn syrup. It takes an hour of strenuous exercise (heart rate at more than 60% of max) to bun 800 calories. There’s no way a PE class can compensate for that.

Soda for us as kids was comparatively expensive–and considered an occasional treat by my parents. It was given instead of a snack, and a 12-ounce can of Acme Black Cherry soda was divided equally among 4 boys. (Who watched like hawks to make sure the division was equitable.) Milk, Water and juice, if we were lucky Hawiian Punch, were around at other times.

And as a recent business trip to Disneyworld confirmed–one fat kid is generally accompanied by two fat parents. I would highly recommend David Kessler’s book–“The End of Overeating.”

Without changing our relationship to food, even the most active kids are going to have a challenge keeping weight off.

And, yes, get out and play too, but no matter what level of activity, the basic formula–calories in vs. calories out–needs to be in proper balance of health and weight control.

Totally agree and I’m so tired of our society being so obsessed with weight.
My kids get 1 to 2 days of gym a week (depending on the grade…they gym teacher only comes on 2 days and each year different grades get the 2 days and some only get 1 day). It’s great and all but it’s not as important as all the time my kids spend outside. I know they start putting on weight in the winter because they don’t spend much time outside. It’s just too cold here and gets dark within hours of getting home from school. But in the summer they are outside from morning till dark. They each lose about 5lbs in the summer.
As a 250lb woman (yeah, I know I should take my own advice or follow my kids’ example, lol) I often wonder what people think when they see me with my skinny kids.
And I agree that forced PE does nothing for health. I was never good at sports and have health issues that make it hard to do high impact aerobic exercise (ie play sports) so I was always slowest in class and I just hated it. All gym did was reinforce how much I hated sports and physical activity and by 5th grade I avoided it at all costs. I remember we did like 5 weeks of wiffle ball at the end of the school year and I never played a single minute until the last day of school when the teacher asked if anyone hadn’t batted yet and my friends forced me to the front of the line. Until then I had sat on the bench…for 5 weeks.
I definitely got more exercise playing army at the railroad tracks, climbing trees at the park and playing tag in our front yard (even if I had to have a special “rest” spot down the street because I couldn’t run far…at least I was running).
And, amazingly, despite my overeating problem and my love of junk food my kids have learned to eat healthy. They are constantly reminding me that what I’m eating is not healthy and they request fresh fruit over candy and cookies for snacks. My 6yo just told me yesterday she wished we had some carrots for a snack, lol. And they ate all the freaking fruit in just a few days.

I actually enjoyed PE up until high school, but that had a lot to do with the way the classes were structured (I attended the same school from kindergarten up to 8th grade). Up until high school, I had PE every day and I have to say, they made sure to keep us active. We ran every day at the start of class – working our way up from 100 yards to just about 1/2 mile (grades 5-8 started at 1/4 mile) – partly as a warm up, partly as conditioning for the longer distance runs for the Presidential Fitness tests. It probably helped that class size at that school topped off at 32 kids per grade, so with grades 5&6 and 7&8 sharing PE periods (and split along gender lines), 90% of the time we were playing rather than sitting on the sidelines waiting to take our turns (we also got a short paper test on the actual rules & regulations of each sport we played). Add in the additional 1/2hr of free recess where we had open access to sports equipment and a sledding hill (trudging up that thing repeatedly through the snow was itself a workout!), and we got a lot of activity in during school hours.

I was stunned when I got to high school and realized that not only did we only have PE 2 or 3 days a week, there was no 1/2 mile run at the beginning of class and very little play time unless you were one of the school sports teams kids. And they wondered why there was such a stark physical difference between the sports teams players and the rest of us. Also, if it was a choice between recess and study hall, recess would have been better, hands down (then again, I was the type of kid who often had did her homework during class).

Video games are also an issue (and not just for kids – I can’t tell you how many friends of mine end up spending whole weekends on the Xbox). They’re not bad, but like most things, should be played with in moderation. My parents wouldn’t buy us a video game system (and this was back in the days of Atari and the first Nintendo) because they didn’t want us to sit inside on our butts when we could be outside playing; my mother even videotaped the afternoon cartoons we liked to watch so that we could watch them at night, after dinner & homework and a full afternoon of playing outside (being able to fast forward through commercials didn’t hurt either).

Diet is also definitely a consideration. Candy, sweet cereals and pop weren’t verboten in the house – especially not when both my parents were chocoholics – but my mother was very careful about parsing it out in reasonable portions (I do have to wonder what she thought of my dad’s stash of Paydays & Reeses Peanut Buttercups in his study though). I do believe that children should be encouraged as much as possible to eat healthier and be taught about nutrition so they can understand what their food choices and activity levels mean for them. Ideally, that knowledge would help them to make better choices, ie – if you want to play video games, that’s ok, but that probably means eating less processed junk food and more fruit & veggies, while if you’re more active, that occasional Snickers bar habit isn’t going to be as much of a problem. If there’s anything I favor regulating more in schools, it’s what’s offered to kids during mealtimes. Pizza & hot dogs are ok in moderation, but I do think schools, as well as parents, have a responsibility to encourage healthy eating habits in their charges. Offering healthier food, snacks and drinks in schools can’t hurt, right? I’ve read about some schools that have had great success with miniature farming programs, where the students grow veggies on school grounds that they care for, harvest and eat/donate to the community (hey, another way to get kids active AND appreciate healthy food!). Here’s a link to similar programs being conducted in the Chicago area if anyone’s interested in reading up on it: http://www.educationworld.com/a_curr/curr313.shtml

However, I do think that kids’ levels of activities outside of school makes a HUGE amount of difference in their physical health and is possibly the biggest aspect of the growing childhood obesity problem. Unstructured play is an essential part of the childhood experience in my opinion – climbing trees, riding bikes and hiking for the fun of it, sorting your own pick-up game of football/basketball/capture the flag or whatever are some of the best memories I have of being a kid. Not to mention, it gave us a chance to learn ON OUR OWN how to work with others by organizing our own games, negotiating rules, figuring out who was responsible for what, sharing equipment and/or play space, sharing skills by teaching/being taught by each other (like how to bounce a soccer ball of your head or throw a killer curveball), etc. How would we have learned all that if some adult had been doing it for us? We can’t expect kids to be active and healthy if we’re not giving them the chance to be because we’re too afraid that they’ll get hurt doing [insert sport/activity/adventure here].

ebohlman –

That’s a great point about how “structuring” playdates/games/etc. can make kids more susceptible to accepting an authoritarian society. Where I went to school as a kid, we were encouraged to think for ourselves and taught that curiosity was no bad thing and questioning what we were told wasn’t wrong as long as we had solid arguments to back our positions up. Imagine my surprise when I got to high school and found that this wasn’t the case in schools everywhere! I count myself inordinately lucky that my parents were able to provide me with that kind of formal education.

Your point about how play seems to be turning into work is also very astute. As if playing volleyball or martial arts or learning piano would have less virtue if it were being done for fun and expanding one’s experience by learning something new even though it’s not particularly necessary, rather than as a means of developing a work ethic or attaining a particular goal.

Sometimes I wonder if that’s part of the problem in motivating kids to be more active (whether in sports or arts or community-building programs) and take more of an interest in school; when things are being sold as “work” – when they could also be fun – it’s harder to get kids to be interested in it. Sure, kids can get exercise, learn about teamwork and how to challenge themselves by, say, playing Little League or Pee-Wee football, but how about encouraging them to play just because it’s, well, fun?

ONe issue is too much homework eating up daylight too. And don’t judge the kids that are overweight – I have one skinny kid and one heavier kid – both are equally active. They ride their bikes, we have healthy food, and the skinny one probably eats more because he has a fast metabolism. Now, with the heavier one, there are some (very few) food issues, but a lot is just bad luck in the genetic draw. (and the poor guy got the bad teeth too.)

I think the judging helps keeps kids fat too – because once they are heavier, they get the comments and really is a cupcake gonna hurt if they are already fat?

In most cases I agree that kids do not need a snack after games and practices. We’ve found that after an 1 and 1/2 hockey practice the kids really do need something. Usually, a cup of chocolate milk or some water and a handful of grapes are all it takes. I can’t stand when my kids come out of the locker room with a huge Gatorade and a bag of chips. I think part of the reason snacks are served are for the social aspect. My kids love sitting in the locker room drinking their juice and talking with their teammates. Angela Ruggiero states in her book that as much as she loved hockey as a child “…I have to admit, though, it was the after-game rituals that I really loved as well as the game itself. Someone always offered us juice boxes and snacks, as the coach gave us the post-game pep talk.” I’m not advocating the snacks but I feel if we must serve them let’s give them something healthy. Kids need protein and water after being very physical. How about celery with peanut butter? Bananas? Anything but cookies please!

thank you!!!!! honestly this is a simple equation. put healthy stuff in + a little outdoor fun = healthy children both mentally, physically, emotionally. Need we say more.
Love this one Lenore.

Patti — it sounds like your kids have lucked out, at least this year. My experience, both personally as a kid and later when I wrote a paper on the subject for a college anthro class, is that your teacher’s attitude is unfortunately rare. I forgot to mention in my rant above that while I never saw a teacher take a slowing kid’s pulse (or even just go up to take a good look at breathing, flushing, signs of elevated heartrate), I did more than once see a kid who’d been pushed to keep running in the heat until he or she had to stop and vomit in the weeds. None of those occasions made the teachers involved change their strategy at all. It was only in college, where the students were free to walk out at any time, that teachers took care to assess individual performance, and leave the students who were doing less than mandated but still clearly pushing themselves to judge their own activity levels.

I’m happy for your kids, but my own opinion of the public school PE system in general is irredeemably low.

Angie

MaeMae– sure, a 90 minute hockey practice is a lot different from a 30 minute soccer game (with little kids who sit out about 10 minutes of that game, and mostly aren’t even playing all that hard.) I am certainly not saying that snacks associated with practices and such are bad. It’s the overkill of the people who think that kids can’t be involved in ANY organized activity without “snack” being involved, regardless of whether the length of the event makes it reasonable or not, that I’m reacting to. Certainly a mentality that kids can’t turn around without someone “making sure” they aren’t hungry for two seconds could contribute to bad eating habits.