ASU Research E-Magazine: A for Activity, F for Sluggo

Physical education and recess are just as important as reading, writing, and arithmetic. Are American schools neglecting the education of children’s bodies in favor of filling up their heads?

Physical activity is the greatest gift you can give your body. Health is the best legacy you can leave your kids. So why are recess and physical education increasingly left out of the equation when schools schedule the other three “Rs” of reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmatic?

The question is important. It deserves attention say Robert Pangrazi and Charles Corbin. Both are professors of exercise science and physical education at Arizona State University. Both are nationally known experts on physical activity.

Six-year-old Brooks could bat and throw like the pro he is named for before the age of two. He has excellent hand/eye coordination and joins in nearly every organized baseball, soccer, or football game he can find. His sister, nine-year-old Danielle, is just the opposite. She shuns organized sports and avoids skills-related games, opting instead to climb trees, play tag, and roller blade.

Which will grow up to be the healthier adult?

Perhaps Danielle, say Pangrazi and Corbin. Children who adopt “lifestyle” activities—which can be done on a moment’s notice without extensive skills, equipment, or required teams—tend to remain more active throughout their lives than people who grow up involved primarily in “skills” activities.

Pangrazi and Corbin have co-authored many books and programs on physical activity. Pangrazi specializes in children’s issues and the education of physical education teachers. Corbin focuses on promoting healthy, active lifestyles for people of all ages.

“Research shows that activity patterns are established primarily in one’s youth,” Pangrazi says. “That is why physical education and recess are as important as reading, writing, and arithmetic in school curriculums.”

“The real problem,” Corbin adds, “is that schools see themselves as dealing mostly with heads. They tend to feel that if they fill up the head, the body will take care of itself. That’s just not the case.”

The issue is longer, more productive lives.

“Look at it this way,” Pangrazi says. “On your deathbed, would you trade your life for the ability to read?”

Pangrazi and Corbin believe schools must continue educating the “whole person,” despite the escalating competition for curriculum time among worthy mathematics, science, and computer programs.

“Inactivity tracks,” Corbin explains. “Studies show that if someone is inactive as a kid, he or she will most likely grow up to be an inactive adult.”

“Inactivity is one of the four key risk factors for heart attack—no matter how smart you are,” Pangrazi adds. “Activity also is an important tool for controlling diabetes and it’s terribly effective against depression.”

So, what should schools do? Physical activity requirements and recommended activities vary with age. It is time to concentrate on young children.

“First, realize that physical movement is the way babies and toddlers learn; it’s pre-verbal,” Corbin says. “They hold up their hand to examine it, test the environment, try to move, then walk. In fact, they need to stress their bones and muscles to stimulate growth.”

Such activities are intermittent, not continuous. They occur in bursts with rest time in between. This intermittent activity occurs naturally—at least until the child gets to school.

“I find it almost unbelievable that some schools lock an organism as active as a young child in a box called a classroom for hours on end and don’t understand the consequences,” Pangrazi says.

Factor in safety and discipline concerns such as not running on sidewalks, walking quietly in line, and the practice of keeping kids in from recess if they do not turn in homework, and schools, by their very nature, almost unteach a child’s natural tendency towards activity.

Pangrazi and Corbin are the principal authors of recent national physical activity guidelines for children published by the National Association for Physical Education and Sport.

“These research-based guidelines show that elementary students should be physically active for at least 30 and 60 minutes every day,” Pangrazi says. “When I say active, I mean active in both a physical education class and through the running and free play they do in shorter, 10 to 15 minute bursts during recess. Both are critical.”

“When taught correctly, physical education provides the tools kids need to become active and fit for a lifetime,” Corbin explains. “Recess is a time to get away; it’s discretionary time when kids can move freely or just mingle and collect their thoughts. Recess and physical education have two very different goals.”

Not surprisingly, both Pangrazi and Corbin would like to see physical education classes offered five days a week in schools—as in, all schools, elementary, junior, and senior high. After all, they argue, breathing is just as important as reading.

It may be much more important, they assert, given that even brilliant minds cease functioning when bodies are felled by heart attacks and other illnesses associated with long-term inactivity.

“Arizona is probably one of the best states in the union when it comes to including physical education as part of the elementary school curriculum. Yet, it’s taught only two, maybe three times a week,” Pangrazi says. “So, we must do it right.”

For Pangrazi, “doing it right” means ensuring that physical education is not mistaken for athletics.

“Physical education is for the masses,” he explains. “It’s about prompting the habit of activity and teaching tools that provide the best opportunity for keeping active throughout ones life. Athletics are for the elite.”

According to Pangrazi, a quality elementary school physical education program is one with a primary goal of teaching kids to be active and successful. It teaches them to feel like winners in ways that reach far beyond the scope of sports. A good program incorporates many types of age and developmentally appropriate activities, preferably in short two to four-week sessions. Every child is exposed to at least some activity that he or she likes and is good at. A good program focuses heavily on processes, not outcomes. More importantly, it rewards efforts, not results.

“We’re talking about starting with two things that kids like—movement and fun—and building on them,” Corbin says. “You start with basic skills and forget all about the concept that says ‘I have to win.’ It’s about realizing that no one is good at everything and everyone is good at something. It’s the ‘doing’ that’s important.”

Pangrazi and Corbin advocate a “task”, rather than an “ego” approach to teaching physical activity. Task is process-driven. Everyone can do it.

For example, in a task-oriented approach to teaching batting, the teacher and student focus on the fundamentals of stance and swing. Are the feet planted correctly? The hands together? Is the child watching the ball all the way to the bat? Is he or she swinging to meet the ball, not kill it, and swinging level?

Doing the basic skill correctly is rewarded. Students come to realize that they can bat correctly. They learn to enjoy trying and they feel good about themselves. Ball contact is not important at this stage.

Conversely, an ego-oriented approach to batting would focus more on the outcome. Did you hit the ball? How often? How hard and how far?

A teacher compliments the hit, regardless of how well the fundamentals are performed. In this approach to learning, a batter who hit the ball farthest would have fun; one who did not make contact probably would not. What’s more, the “good” batter probably would not enjoy practice because there would be no one there to “beat.”

“We must get off the kick of believing that we have to get kids into highly competitive programs really early so that they can be the best,” Pangrazi says. “After all, genetics control up to 70 percent of one’s total physical performance potential.”

Factors such as physical size, speed, agility, reaction time, and strength are pretty much God-given, he explains. Which means that coaches can only train your son or daughter to perform up to the level of their own genetic limitations.

“Even the best athletic coach can’t make every kid an Olympic athlete, any more than the best teacher can make every kid an Olympic reader,” Corbin says. “We should start young. But our goal should be teaching basic skills that lead to lifelong proficiency, or in this case, activity, rather than starting young to build future champions.”

Pangrazi and Corbin say children under age 11 should not be exposed to organized athletic or competitive physical education programs for several reasons. For example, skeletal type and physical maturation levels can vary by as much as six full years among eight-year-olds. Visualize kindergartners and sixth graders playing together on the same team. The result is a fairly accurate picture of what occurs in the average Little League program for eight-year-olds.

How does the child at the kindergarten maturation level feel? He or she may believe they are not good enough, may suffer lowered self-esteem, and may even begin to opt out of sports and other forms of activity, according to Pangrazi and Corbin. Yet, had the parents waited until that child had physically matured, he or she may have wound up being the star player.

It works both ways.

“Studies have shown that among children who did well in athletics in fifth grade (age 11), only one in four, or 25 percent, did well later in high school,” Pangrazi says. Then there is the opposite. “Thirty-five percent of basketball players in the NBA never played basketball before their junior year of high school, the most notable being Michael Jordan.”

Either way, sport skills alone are not the point. “All too often, people who grow up playing sports—especially team sports—become adults who end up watching sports rather than doing them,” Corbin says. “Sports can involve a high degree of skill and not all that much activity. So, the person who remains active, doing whatever, is better off long term.”

Corbin specializes in fitness and adults. He defines fitness as being the sum of what you are. Activity, he says, is the path that gets—and keeps—you there.

“I was on Good Morning America responding to the claim that America’s children are inactive and unfit,” Corbin says. “In reality, our children are much more fit and active than we are as adults. Of concern is that physical activity among young people declines with age. With each passing year in school, kids become less active.” Such inactivity can be tracked.

“We’ve already talked about opting out in Little League,” he continues. “We also know that the single biggest decline in activity occurs among girls during the teenage years. A large percentage of all kids drop out of physical activity by their sophomore year in high school.”

Pangrazi and Corbin believe that schools—including junior and senior highs—should become the first line of defense in the war on inactivity because kids attend daily through age 18. But the emphasis should be on interesting activity for all students, not just on high-level athletics for the elite few.

The second most likely time for activity occurs immediately after school ends. That is when many children, especially pre-teens, attend some type of after-school care programs. The ASU researches say that such programs should encourage movement and non-competitive activities.

Once at home, parents should give their kids and themselves every opportunity for many forms of activity. Studies show that children with active parents tend to be more active themselves.

“If I only had one wish I’d wish for good health. We all know that phrase,” Pangrazi says. “But when push comes to shove, too many people put studying and job success ahead of a legacy of health for themselves and their children.”—Lindsey Michaels