Physical Education Encourages Healthy Students

Christine Gates - Junior
The University of Dayton's Student Newspaper
www.flyernews.com

The other day I was sitting in chapter waiting for a student (not in my chapter) to give a presentation about recruitment. As I was sitting there we started conversation with the typical name, grade, major, etc. When I answered the question about my major, I proudly replied "physical education." "Oh you mean gym," she replied. "That's kind of a fancy name for gym," she commented. In this article I wanted to clarify the common misconceptions of the stereotypical "gym" teacher. Growing up, our generation and our parents' generation spent their physical education classes with a "gym" teacher. The kind of teacher that rolled out the soccer ball, said play ball, and then would go back to eating his doughnut and reading his paper. This is where the title physical education slipped into the gym teacher.

However, my colleagues and I do not see ourselves as gym teachers with the doughnut and paper in hand. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention says 16.3 percent of children and adolescence from ages 2 to 19 are obese, 35.3 percent of adult women are obese, and 33.3 percent of adult men are obese. Obesity is defined as having a Body Mass Index (BMI) greater than 30. In this day and age with the constant rise of obesity rates the need for quality, physical education is in even greater demand. Our job as physical educators is to educate our students about health issues, eating right, and participating in physical activity. Our job is to use the 30 to 40 minutes we have a week with the students to get the students' heart rates up by implementing constant activity right when the students walk into the classroom. Our job is to give the students exposure to all forms of activity so that students can find an activity they enjoy doing and that they will continue for the rest of their life. The ACSM (American College for Sports Medicine) recommends moderate aerobic physical activity at a minimum of 30 minutes five days a week, vigorous aerobic activity at a minimum of 20 minutes three days a week, two or more nonconsecutive days of weight training, and two to three days of flexibility training. My job and my colleagues' jobs are to share this information with the students we teacher so that the prevalence of obesity and the diseases it causes will no longer be an American epidemic.