Many people think of physical education and sports programs interchangeably. I started getting skeptical about that notion when I first read a book by Kenneth Cooper titled The Aerobics Program for Total Well-Being. The book describes Cooper’s aerobic point system that helps people develop a fitness program to assure they do the right kind of exercises to keep them fit. It disabused me of the notion that sports such as football, basketball, golf, tennis, or even soccer were particularly good activities on which to base a fitness program. When you take out all the standing around, timeouts, watching while others perform, and exercise performed in short anaerobic spurts, those activities are really not much good. Cooper assigns points for different activities depending on the aerobic qualities derived from doing them. Not surprisingly, running, swimming, aerobic dance, cross-country skiing, and combative sports like wrestling and boxing fared very well in terms of aerobic points earned per minute of activity. Here is a chart with points for some of the activities he measured.
We like programs like Cooper’s because it is possible to measure activity. Early on, we decided we wanted a program that would help the kids develop a habit of good fitness. We wanted to tie the physical fitness program to healthy eating. Then, like all our other homeschool activities, we wanted to be able to measure progress in addition to activity. I knew that Cooper had continued to do research after he wrote his first book. He learned that, in addition to aerobic training, strength training is also important for long term fitness. We decided to design a physical education program that included three main focus areas: aerobic fitness, strength training, and diet. Up until now we have concentrated mostly on aerobic fitness and diet as the kids have been too young to take up a serious weight training program. We will start a more formal weight training program this summer.
The kids are on a summer swim team at the YMCA that earns them many more points than they need for a base level of aerobic fitness. During the rest of the year we needed to find an activity they could do in an hour or so that was both measurable and not too tedious. Our YMCA has great exercise facilities, but the reality of the matter is that most of the aerobic point producing activities are fairly tedious, so the measurement itself needs to be a big part of the motivation for doing the activities. We have reached several milestones this year in regard to the kid’s fitness. The greatest is that both Kelly and Christian have medium and long term fitness goals on which they have made good progress. The hard part was to continue through 35 minutes on an elliptical machine or a track for enough days to get infected with the joy of making progress toward a goal. After they met some short term goals (Christian did over 100 push-ups in a day, Kelly hit a certain distance/calorie output for 35 minutes on an elliptical machine), they were energized to continue. I think they will see the same kind of effect when we start lifting weights later this spring.
They have gotten me inspired to push a little harder than the 3-4 miles of walking I do every day. We have decide we will start a graph of our progress here on this blog to go along with the weight loss chart.
