Exercise for children - constructive and positive

For context - I was born in 1960.
Up to age eleven I played and enjoyed any sport available to me but especially football (soccer). I was a particularly fast sprinter despite being a bit chubby. Parents didn't have the time or money to ferry me to organised sports.
From eleven to sixteen I went to a very stuffy and old fashioned grammar school with a dreadful elitist attitude to sports - which was fine if you were regarded as one of the elite but hopeless if you weren't one of the chosen few.

Main competitive sports were rugby and cricket, footballs were actually banned from the school premises for my first few years there!
All the boys that had played cricket and rugby before (Prep School mostly) formed the school teams and very few "outsiders" like me ever broke into the exclusive club in the next five years.
Zero support, encouragement or coaching was given unless you were in the first team. So my rugby education was of the "here's the ball, run forwards, pass backwards" variety. I learned more about rugby in my 40's during a three day coaching course than I did in five years of playing the game.
One newcomer was particularly talented and brave but was told he would never play for the school unless he got his long hair cut.

Despite being the fastest at 60m and top three at 100m my face didn't fit as I wasn't one of the chosen few so never represented the school in athletics. Our introduction to distance running was without any warning or preparation being made to run 3 miles cross country on the coldest, wettest day of winter. Hated long distance running ever since. Only ran 5k and 10k twenty years later as a challenge after my knee got wrecked but it's still not my thing.

My sports after school were very individual, motorcycle racing and squash mostly. Even now as a cyclist I'm a solo rider so wonder if my school experience put me off team sports? I'm still very driven, determined and self-competitive. I think my negative school experience actually helped develop that attitude and made me stronger and more determined, proving people wrong is a big motivator to me.

You can turn a negative experience into a positive motivator. I used the "Douglas Bader approach" (try everything) with my children and encouraged them all the way to find the sports they enjoy - both played rugby which I why I became a qualified coach. My son is a very gifted sportsman and lives for his cricket but has an irritating ability to excel at any ball sport with little apparent effort (no he didn't get that from me!). My daughter wasn't and isn't very sporty but uses the gym to keep fit and has good body confidence.

My experiences with my elementary school PE teacher have followed me my entire damned life when it comes to running. This year, I am going through the C25K to run an entire 5K just to prove I *can*... though I have still not rallied the courage to run outside for fear of being made fun of... pretty ridiculous for a middle aged woman to still have residual effects from something so long ago, but there you go.

I wonder if she had not been such a cruel, raging beeyotch if I would have continued playing soccer and gone out for other sports in school.

I have kids that are in secondary schools now. It does seem that the PE program has changed some in the last 20 or so years. They do a variety of activities in PE, including team and individual sports. It seems like the goal is more to improve individual fitness, but there are still some artifacts from the 20th century hanging on.

In junior high my daughter had "pacers" where they had to maintain a certain pace through laps back and forth across the gym (blech). They also had to improve their mile times. My son's class did regular runs, and I believe there was a goal time for them to reach ... no idea how those were determined. But they also did a lot of games and activities they found enjoyable.

In high school, my daughter has also had the "regular" gym class. Again, quite a variety, including work in the weight room (and they actually learned how to properly lift!) Next year, she gets to take a class that is basically going to the Gold's Gym down the street for regular workouts.

One big change I've noticed is that the PE classes are now co-ed, whereas when I was in Jr High and High in the early to mid 90s it was boys and girls separate. Good thing about it is that there is less "that's a girl's exercise" or "that is a boy's exercise" mentality (I never got to step foot in the weight room in high school).

We need to encourage our kids, from early elementary school on, to stay active and be willing to try different things. I'm not big on the required runs (I wasn't a runner in high school, hated it, and felt pretty incompetent for years because of it) but we also need to get every kid moving more!

I started competitive track and field when I was in 3rd grade, but not with school...with Hershey T&F. I also did gymnastics outside of school and played youth football outside of school. I always enjoyed gym class as well and didn't start playing competitive sports in school until high school where I ran track, played football, swim team, and a short stint on the wrestling team.

I loved every minute of it and just grew up involved in sports and athletics. It made things much easier to pick back up a few years ago when I decided I like fit me a lot better than unfit and fat me.

Firstly, I was born summer 1985 in Washington state and remained there to the present. My experiene was mixed. I had always been heavy, and varying degrees of unconditioned but with no major health issues. Due to lack of atheticism I was excluded to a degree by my peers. Honestly, I saw some of the yay everyone gets a trophy stuff. I didn't feel stigmatized by my gym classes but often being in the bottom half of physical capacity testing was discouraging. As a twist of irony during my best time of fitness in eighth grade I felt horrible about myself for other reasons, junior high was terrible. What I really wanted was to be accepted by my peers and not be seperated along physical lines. I found that outside school in the cub/boy scouts, which was great for all sorts of things. When I did participate in things having a good time was my focus. It always has and it grated on me to be surrounded by a competitive structure.

Well... when i was a kid i entered into gymnastics. at first it was just a fun thing to do, but as i progressed quickly into acheiving some basic skills (kip, back walk over, cartwheel on balance beam, flip flop, lay over vault, etc.) they moved me into "team". This is when i began competitive gymnastics where not only was i competing against other teams throughout the county, state, and then region (region 3 represent) it started to become soul sucking as i competed against the girls in my own gym.

Luckily my mother was poor and i was a kid whose team membership/leos/competition fees were handled via fundraisers. My mom was also always working so i got rides from my other team members parents and my mom rarely saw me during the 4x weekly practices. Other parents on the other hand... they ruined this sport for their kids. it became their job, not something to do for fun. It was something that was expected of them. And i was generally looked down upon by the team moms because my mom was "trash" compared to them. These stay at home moms with their fancy SUVs used to literally talk shnit about the other girls on our team "Oh, you know rainbowbow is going to choke on vault." OR "My little becky is just more talented than sally and the coach should spend more time with her".

if you could only hear the way these grown women behaved...

All that being said, i was never required to take P.E. in school because i was training in the gym more than 20 hours per week. I received some sort of state exemption and i was always allowed to take 2 electives instead.

So... how are school sports? I dont know. But i do know that as an adult I don't enjoy sports that much because i always feel like i have something to prove, i have to be the best to prove my worth, etc. And if it's something i'm not good at i've always refuse to try because i don't want to be judged or looked down upon.

These are things i'm working on now. There are a few things i'd probably find fun to do (like swimming which i don't know how to do, or tennis, or volleyball) i just need some direction. Most of the things i want to learn to do require someone else and i don't know how i feel about subjecting someone else to my suckage.


P.S. if it's any consolation on saturdays (for 8 years) our practice was from 7am-3pm. The first 45 minutes we had to do a 3 mile run or a 5 mile rollerblade session. we usually went in groups of 2-3 girls.

Even in the peak of my physical fitness i hated running and sucked at it. I can do sprints, but just steady state cardio? Kill me. I decided one day to rollerblade instead and part of the path we were using was a 1 lane road with a ditch on both sides. A car flew past us and i fell face first into the ditch where i was then covered in 200+ (atleast!) stickers. I braced with my hands so they got the brunt of it. My coach went in, ripped them out, poured hydrogen peroxide over my palms, taped me, and then said "okay ladies, we're working bars next".

This memory (and many many more) haunt me to this day.

I was at an all girls school, graduated in 2008. School PE for me was awful, I hated to run and I hated netball, and I couldn't play tennis (lots of the girls had lessons, a minority of us had no idea) and those seemed to be the go-to options from our teachers. I used to swim a lot, often up to 12 sessions a week with two different squads, but I couldn't run for s**t so the PE teachers decided I was unfit, lost cause...despite the fact that when we had school swimming lessons and they assessed our ability they told me to just go and swim in a lane by myself or with one other girl because there was no point them "teaching" me to swim.

That experience put me off sports and running for so long, until towards the end of school when I had stopped swimming with the squads and wanted to keep fit, when I started running occasionally by myself and playing social games of anything besides netball at lunchtime. I found I actually didn't mind running when someone wasn't barking orders at me and looking exasperated because I was slow. I started running more and more, eventually most days, supplementing with swimming and the occasional spin class. Then last year when I was injured bought a bike and have been racking up 250-300+km/week for the last year or so and I love it! It was never even presented to me as an option growing up.

My little sister (currently 15, ten years younger) has had a vaguely similar experience. She was not a bad runner, they asked her to join the cross country team...and then made her hate it so much she gave up running altogether and now does absolutely nothing in terms of sports or physical activity.

I think school teachers really need to be mindful of the way they approach this sort of thing, it really put me off being active for years and made me feel awful about myself because they'd always tell me I needed to "get fitter". I might not have been able to run, but I could swim, and their dismissal of my ability and fitness was unfair.