4 Reasons Gym Class Failed Me As A Kid

I was never a fan of gym class when I was in school. I wasn't obese at the time, but I was surely technically overweight, and despite the fact that I was a cheerleader from 8th grade through high school I just generally wasn't very athletic. Why didn't twelve years of gym class help me at all?

1. Most gym teachers treated me like I wasn't as important as those who were athletes.

I don't know how it is now, but in my day once you got into junior high the gym teachers were usually also team coaches. That meant that half their time was spent coaching athletes to compete with other athletes, putting them through workouts intended to improve specific skills. The rest of their day was spent with classes made up mostly of unenthusiastic, out-of-shape kids, forcing them into some kind of activity for an hour at a time.

From my perspective, those classes seemed to be something these coaches had little enthusiasm for, themselves. Those of us who weren't participating in team sports were treated like we were either lazy or incapable of actually being athletic. Those who were already athletic were praised heavily and got a lot more activity during gym class, which is actually pretty backwards when you think about it.

Granted, the rest of us had a pretty bad attitude about even being in gym class, but that might have been helped tremendously if the classes had been conducted differently. As it was, I remember spending a lot of time standing around while more athletic kids played games or being talked down to because I couldn't do a pullup or climb a rope or generally perform as well as the proven athletes. I got the clear message that the gym teachers really didn't like me much, being all weak and unable to run a mile in 12 minutes. They certainly liked the kids who were good at those things.

And yes, before anyone comments to correct me, I'm sure I was on the other end of that equation in academic classes. I got plenty of praise from math, science, art, and English teachers, but I don't recall those teachers treating the rest of the class like their brains must just not be capable of learning. If anything, the extra praise got me less work to do, not more. But gym class felt like ultimate judgment. "Climb that rope. No, three feet isn't good enough. You get an F. Sit over there with the other losers and watch these guys show you what a winner looks like."

2. Gym class didn't actually teach me how to be more physically fit.

With the exception of the one weightlifting class I took in high school, most of the time I spent in gym class was focused on either finding a way to make us sweat for an hour or teaching us the rules to various games and sports. All the things I've learned about exercise as an adult is pretty much new to me. We didn't learn about the benefits of strength training (even in weightlifting, really -- we only learned how to do it, not why) or how to properly do cardio. We'd briefly talk about obesity in health class sometimes and why we should want to be a healthy weight, but not in enough depth to really teach any of us what to do about it beyond "eat less and be more active." I remember talking about target heart rate a bit during a semester class I took in high school on aerobics (Not aerobic activity in general, aerobics tapes. We did aerobics tapes for gym class. Seriously.), but we never learned how to actually improve our fitness level. We did activity just to do activity. Until it came time to do the President's Physical Fitness Test each year (or semester? I don't remember now.) our fitness abilities weren't regularly tested or tracked for improvements. We showed up, did some kind of calisthenics or stretches to warm up, and then played some kind of game or did some group activity for the remainder of the class. And that was it. And while for most of us who are now trying to lose weight it's a good thing to just get in the habit of moving around more, that's not all there is to being physically fit. But they didn't really teach us anything beyond "it's good to move around enough so you sweat sometimes."

News flash: learning how to keep score during flag football doesn't improve one's fitness level.

3. They tested us, but didn't make us practice for the test.

Remember the President's Physical Fitness Test? I don't know if they still do this, but back in the 80s and 90s in my area, the school system used it as a test for all students at the end of every year. I remember it consisting of a mile run, a flexibility test, situps, pullups (eventually the girls only had to do a bent-arm hang), and some other things I don't remember. I remember that the test was actually intended to be a program where awards would be given to students across the nation who scored really well on all the exercises. But that's not how it was used in the classroom. If you didn't score well enough to qualify for the award on each exercise, you didn't get a passing grade for that exercise. The only reason I got good grades in gym was that there were usually some written tests or participation points or bonuses you could get for wearing school colors to class every day that made up for my lack of performance.

You know what would have helped my performance? If we'd have actually trained to be better at the things we were tested on at the end of the year. As you know, I'm now training to racewalk a marathon. To prepare, I'm doing a lot of walking. I'm not preparing by playing a lot of raquetball because playing a lot of raquetball isn't going to help me come race day. Unless the spectators will be throwing balls at us as we go by, but I'm pretty sure that's not the case. Anyway, in gym class we were tested on our ability to do situps and run, but trained for those tests by playing frisbee golf, standing on the sidelines of basketball games, and sometimes jogging a couple of times across the gym. If they wanted us to run a mile in 12 minutes, why didn't they make us do more running? If they wanted us to be able to reach past our toes, why didn't we spend time on flexibility? (And I was actually good at that one because of all the time I spent on flexibility for cheerleading. See how that works?) If they wanted us to do pullups and pushups, why didn't we do exercises to strengthen our arm and back muscles? Or if they were going to spend most of the time teaching us to play team sports, why weren't we tested on our ability to play team sports?

4. It sucked, and I hated being there.

I always got the sense that gym classes were really meant to get kids to have a more positive attitude towards physical activity, which is an admirable goal. But even beyond being treated like useless non-athletes and tested over things we hadn't trained for, nothing about gym class was really pleasant or fun for anyone who wasn't already athletic. It wasn't fun to play team sports when nobody wanted you on their team and you spent most of the time on the sidelines or in positions where you were least likely to screw things up. Exercise is fun for me now not because the act of doing it is somehow less painful than it used to be but because I know there's a purpose to it and I can see a payoff. But that's not how it felt in gym class. The only purpose I could see to going through the motions of gym class was to preserve my GPA. I didn't see improvements, I had to do the same activities I didn't enjoy week after week, year after year, with seemingly no purpose other than keeping us corralled and moving around for an hour at a time. It didn't make me enjoy physical activity. In fact, it made me dread it. I dreaded being made to feel fat and incapable.

It's really not that I don't like playing team sports. I do enjoy them in the right context. I used to work for a company that competed in corporate league sports. Okay, I use the term "competed" rather loosely, since we never won a tournament or even harbored the delusion that we might. But we had fun. I played volleyball and softball and bowled. I wasn't especially good at any of it, but I wasn't forced to the sidelines or made fun of. And because I spent time actually playing I did get better over time. I found the things I was good at, like serving a volleyball. I was allowed to play shortstop because I was better at it than being in the outfield. Office sports were fun and I looked forward to them despite my lack of natural skill or athletic ability. Hell, I actually played hard enough that I got injured a couple of times! It's never been the sports I didn't like, it was always the environment in which I had to play them.

It's just that gym class was seemingly engineered to be discouraging. We had to do things we weren't good at in an environment that didn't make us feel like we had any hope for improving. And I was somewhat middle-of-the-pack. God help the obese kids. It must have been forty times worse for them.

I can only hope gym classes are less horrible these days. My gut feeling tells me they're not. Of all the classes I could have benefited from in school, gym was probably the one I needed most. And yet it was the one that totally failed to deliver.

I do have to say I had a few understanding, non-judgmental, encouraging gym teachers. One even fudged my mile run time one year because she didn't want my gym grade to damage my GPA and I had just barely failed the mile by a few seconds. When I got to high school and was able to select what gym classes I signed up for, things were better. I didn't dread going quite as much. But I didn't really learn more. I didn't get in better shape. And those classes didn't teach me what I needed to know about being healthy and active. They did teach me that there were certain physical activities that I enjoyed more than others. Valuable lesson, but not enough to keep me from gaining a ton of weight later in life. And when I did go to the gym as an adult, I had no idea how to really get the most out of it. No gym or health class had ever really taught me how to create a workout regimen that actually did much of anything to improve my fitness level.

It's rather sad to think that we spend all sorts of time in school learning things that aren't directly useful in our adult lives, and yet when it comes to something vital like our physical health we get a small amount of basic information on diet and fitness and spend a lot of time being herded into classes that mostly teach us to play games we won't ever play again.