[OPINION] My long road to physical education

Growing up, I never understood the E in PE. In my other subjects, education meant learning new things through deliberate study. If you did your homework and studied for exams, you improved your grade.  

With Physical Education, however, I felt helpless. I was bad at team sports and performed poorly in physical fitness exams like the one-mile run. By the time I got to high school, I was so used to my athletic mediocrity, that I decided to stop playing sports. While my classmates played basketball, I sat in a corner and crammed for the next class. 

I could improve my English grade, even my math grade, but these rules did not apply to PE. I watched the grace, speed, and strength of my varsity athlete classmates, and concluded there was no way that I could be like them. Athleticism was as a gift, and I didn’t have it.  

It took me years to figure out that I was wrong. Like any skill, physical fitness and preparedness can be acquired through study, practice, and the setting of concrete goals. 

My journey to loving physical culture began when I was in my late twenties, and it began, like many fitness journeys begin, with vanity. One day, I decided that I wanted to see my abs before I turned 30. And like the time I tried to get straight As in my college report card (a “cuatro” in Ateneo-speak), I became obsessive. I read about fitness and diet, cut my carbs, and went to the gym. Like the time I tried to get straight As, as well, I sort of achieved my goal (I got a 3.9 on my report card; my abs were visible under the right lighting conditions). 

My body transformation experience taught me that I could “hack” my fitness and nutrition. But it did something more important: it got me to study physical fitness, to put the E back in PE. 

Few of us think about getting fit in educational terms. These days, we outsource our fitness to trainers and Youtube, and we judge the work outs they give us based on how much they make us pant and sweat – a phenomenon Dan John, America’s “godfather of strength and conditioning,” calls the “cult of intensity.” But you don’t really need to pay someone to get give you a beating; you can just sprint 10 flights of stairs. 

In recent decades, this self-inflicted suffer-fest approach to fitness has drawn its scientific validity from the concept of High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT), an exercise strategy based on the work of Japanese sports scientist Izumi Tabata, who found that cardiovascular fitness could be improved through short bursts of intense activity followed by short rest periods. 

While Tabata’s work remains important, trainers have used it as license to make people puke. It is now becoming clear that HIIT has its downsides; namely that it takes a while for your body to recover from these efforts, and that doing extreme cardio daily may compromise your immune system – not ideal during a pandemic. And while HIIT does work, sports scientists are discovering ways to achieve similar, even better results using easier methods (see here, here, and here). 

Apart from the cult of intensity, another problem with mainstream fitness is that it’s random. Good trainers are like good schoolteachers or college professors; they outline objectives, they produce roadmaps to achieve these objectives, and they give you manageable homework. In this regard, they make a distinction between random exercise (which is what happens in many HIIT classes) and purposive training. 

A purposive training program can do many things for you, but the best ones make you strong. You can raise your heart rate to insane levels every day, without being able to do a push up or a pull up. And yet we neglect strength at our own peril, because strength is key to longevity and  even an efficient route to weight loss. Being strong is also “functional.” You can wobble on balls with 1-pound weights as much as you want, but you aren’t really functional if you can’t carry your 20-kg maleta up a flight of stairs. (READ: LIST: Where to buy gym equipment for your home)

Fitness is built on strength. As the sports scientist Leonid Matyevev explains, “Strength is the foundation for the development of the rest of physical qualities.” Being strong makes everything, from running to yoga, a bit easier – a fact that even Jose Rizal knew. And lest women think that being strong means getting bulky, look at how trim Brie Larson got after becoming strong enough to push a truck up a hill (ladies, Gwyneth Paltrow is evil; she wants you to be a waif, too weak to carry your own luggage or knock out an abuser or an asshole).  

I used to fail push up and pull up tests in high school, and I simply accepted my fate as a weakling. Had I known that there was a simple plan l to improve proficiency at bodyweight exercises, that problem may have been solved. And had I known that it was possible to do a one-hand push up and a one-hand squat in a matter of months or that teenagers can learn how to bench press their own weight without suffering, I may have walked with a little bit more confidence in high school. 

Our educational system should teach kids how to plan for fitness. And, amid the quarantine, we should plan for our fitness as well. Indeed, this is the perfect time to set fitness goals, like your first pull up or something more unconventional like crawling non-stop for 10 minutes (anyone who can do this is super fit). My own quarantine goal is to improve my work capacity and the “final exam” will be to see if I can swing a 32-kg kettlebell 100 times in 5 minutes (my teacher/coach uses a lesson plan/program based on this).

Education is best when it is democratic. Anyone should be able to read Aristotle, learn how to write poetry, or balance an equation. This principle should apply to physical education as well. Everyone, old or young, can learn to be strong. – Rappler.com

Lisandro E. Claudio (Leloy) is a newly-minted OFW, who works as an assistant professor at the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies, the University of California, Berkeley.