what is our future with kids' fitness?

Brett Kilka of Fitness Quest 10 in San Diego, works with kids every day. This is his opinion of our problem in teaching today's youth exercise "skills." We have had to change our approach to training adults, why not kids? If ADULTS don't have the skills to move, how do we expect our kids to learn them? Their parents don't know, there is NO or LIMITED physical education in our schools, so where do we turn? Mr. Kilka, in my opinion, has a piece of the puzzle down:


"Our current curriculum for working with kids is outdated. It is designed and implemented on the assumption that kids are still capable of doing the things that kids did 20 or 30 years ago. When this curriculum is implemented with groups of kids, whether it’s in physical education classes, sports, teams, camps, or even personal training groups, you’ll see that less than 10 percent of the kids can actually accomplish the given tasks. Ninety percent of the group is failing, yet the apathetic instructor moves on. It’s like physical education has become akin to law school. However, instead of getting people out of parking tickets for a living, you have a heart attack at age 25 if you aren’t in the top 10 percent.

To be proactive, we need to start viewing body weight activities with our youth as “skills” instead of “exercises.” In the good old days, kids developed many physical skills on their own through general daily activity. When an instructor would have them do a push-up, the summation of their daily tasks would allow for the strength and stability to do so. Pushing their body weight away from the ground was a demonstration of their coordination and strength. They didn’t really need to practice it much because of their active, adaptive neural systems. In those days, you could just throw “exercises” out at the kids and they could do them pretty well with some basic coaching. It doesn’t work that way anymore.

With the inactivity problem, there is hardly any strength and coordination to “showcase” in an exercise. A push-up has to be a learned skill. It has to be adapted, progressed, and practiced. Even general movement tasks like bear crawls, crab walks, and skips have to be acquired as a skill."

http://www.elitefts.com/documents/too_fat.htm

Well said. Never too early to start...