Why PE class probably sucked, and what you can learn anyway

"Those who can't do, teach; those who can't teach, teach gym." - Woody Allen, Annie Hall

I'm not sure how it is today, but my days in PE class were less than satisfying. Jumping jacks, pushups, situps, and running laps. Then floor hockey or some such thing. And it completely sucked.

Gym class did not suck because it involved effort and sweat - far from it, I was quite physically active, practicing tae kwon do five days a week. Nor was it torture because it was sports I disliked: how can you hate flag football, especially when it's boys against girls? In fact I didn't even realize until recently that the reason why I hated gym class was...there was no reason for it.

For those who don't know (either out of ignorance or denial), "PE" stands for physical education. If you're in a class called that, you would expect to know something about your body and its use. But I did not walk out of there physically educated. I remember several times when teachers of other classes made an effort to explain why we were studying math, or history, or lit; I don't recall a single time that anything was explained in gym. It wasn't PE, it was just P.

And, what is really appalling (apart from our being a nation in worse health than ever), the gym teachers are supposed to know what they're doing. So that should mean they could explain the routines. But did they? No, at least not in any way that stuck. This means kids left school without the know-how to train intelligently. Not that it mattered, since many were successfully discouraged from physical exercise - by the ridiculous jock culture, but more importantly, by the teachers who were supposed to give us the means of independent action. (Which means either the gym teachers didn't know their material, or they didn't know how to teach it. It's ludicrous in any case.)

Of course I could have simply asked, but I didn't. I just tuned out for the most part, in gym and other classes. That much is my fault, and the only thing I can do is own up to it. Nevertheless, the instructors were not exactly encouraging. We were just supposed to keep running, spike the ball, or whatever was on deck that week - then shower up.

Believe it or not, there is a lesson to be learned from the stupidity: if you're going to exercise, it pays to know what you're doing and why you're doing it. Not only will you train more safely, it'll be more interesting because you understand. When you forget why you decided to run (if you thought about it at all), it's harder to stay motivated. And it doesn't need to be that way.

Fortunately you don't have to go into all the details of sports science; get the fundamentals down and add as much detail as needed for your purposes. You don't have to be a geek about it, unless that's what you want. Since your gym teacher didn't give you any principles to work from after graduation, you'll have to find them yourself. My aim is to help you find some of those ideas and sort things through (read: expose bogus notions) where necessary. That way we can go on to do something more for our friends and family, and who knows? - maybe our little world will benefit some too. I don't want to make too much of your workout, but things do have a funny way of generating effects we wouldn't have expected.