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.
Interesting. I did mostly Cross Country and Swimming back in my days of sports. And while I can totally see how the competitions of any sport has a lot of standing around and waiting, I think many sports–soccer, football, tennis–require an incredible amount of aerobic activity during training. …though, I really didn’t do much with those kinds of sports, so I could be totally wrong [smile].
In any case, it sounds like you-all have a good system in place. Keep up the great work!
~Luke
Luke – A very, very good comment. I know that what you say about the tennis, soccer, and football sports training is true. I played football and basketball in school and got in pretty good shape, but we were not even close to the condition of the cross country runners and the wrestlers. Part of our goal, that I really did not write about so much in this post, is that we want them to have some life-long fitness skills when they finish with school. I played quite a bit of basketball after I got out of high school, but did none of the associated fitness training. I think some people are disciplined enough and have enough time to do both.
It was amusing to me that Kenneth Cooper has an anecdote about a guy who went to the Cooper clinic for a second time after having lost an incredible amount of weight. Cooper asked him how he lost the weight. The guy told him he had been playing a lot of racquetball. Cooper did not believe him so they ran him through a huge battery of tests. They could not figure out how he had lost so much weight playing racquetball until they got around to asking him how long he played every day. It turns out he was playing about three hours per day, five days per week. Covert Bailey, the guy that wrote the Fit or Fat says pretty much the same thing–even low level aerobic activity works wonders if you do enough of it.
So I think what you say is a very good caveat. Thanks again for stopping in.
Maybe it’s spring that turns our thoughts to exercise! We (the kids and I) just started an exercise regime that involves 30 minutes of either endurance/cardiovascular, (our heart rate has to be up for the whole time) flexibility and balance, or strength training. We try to do each of these 2x per week so we are working out 6 days per week. It’s breathed fresh energy into our days!
That is excellent Audrey. It would be interesting to know what you actually doing. Speaking of fresh air reminded me of the need to be in the sun 10 or 15 minutes per day. We are trying to do that, too. There are SO many things to think about in designing programs like these.
Strength: squats, sit-ups, push-ups, lunges, curls, leg lifts.
Flexibility & balance: yoga-type stretches and balancing poses or Pilates for Kids DVD.
Endurance/cardio: Running/jogging, biking, jumping rope, dancing to music, step aerobics, frisbee, or anything that keeps our heart rate up for 30 minutes!
Wow. That is an impressive list. Your doing it with your kids reminds me of when I used to sit on the couch and tell the kids to run around the island separating the kitchen, dining room, and living room. I would tell them to run, hop, walk backwards, skip, etc. They thought it was fun. It makes me tired just thinking about it.
Wow. I’m tired after reading this and the comments. 😉
I feel like I’m doing well to get in Pilates on a semi-regular basis, walk for 20 minutes from time to time, and do our weekly Karate with the warm-up stretches and some practice through the week. I also garden. I’m sure I do not get enough true aerobic exercise according to the books.
Lynn
PS – sounds like you all had a great time on your trip. The Coke Museum sounds fascinating! Glad you had a safe and fun trip!
Thanks Lynn. We had a great time in Atlanta. I bet with all your gardening and work outside you get way more aerobic exercise than you realize. I know that people who garden live longer. I suppose it is because of the exercise and fresh air.
I am a physical education major researching blogs and am glad I came upon this one. I had never heard of Cooper’s aerobic points system, but it seems to be a positive way to encourage exercise. I would also recommend seeing if there are any homeschool physical education classes started by other homeschool students or you could start one yourselves. Also, another way to improve your fitness is buying an inexpensive pedometer or step counter, then making a goal of more steps for yourself each day.
Hello Allison. We very much appreciate the tips you gave us. I especially like the one about the pedometer or step counter. I think it really helps a lot in an exercise program to have goals and to measure progress toward the goals. My main activity during the day is walking, but I have really not had a good way to measure how much exercise I get. I think it would be interesting for the kids to wear a pedometer for several weeks to see how much walking they do outside of their exercise program.
The homeschool physical education idea is a good one, too. We have participated in those before and have plenty of them around here that we could join–we do a lot of other stuff with homeschool groups. The problem is finding time for something that requires a forty minute drive, four days per week. We have found that it works best for us to do four days per week of measured exercise and then do one day of physical activity with a homeschool group. Of course this is in addition to swim team.