Positive trends toward a healthier future society include innovative fitness equipment and activities that are appealing to adults. But the fitness ethos must begin earlier in life, and education should reintroduce physical activity for children, argues a futurist consultant.
The promotion of healthy lifestyles is benefiting from calorie-burning innovations that are almost as numerous as calorie-gaining temptations. One only has to view late-night cable TV for a little while to see an advertisement for some type of exercise equipment promising extraordinary health benefits, such as the Bowflex Home Gym. Games and activities, too, seem more imaginative than ever in promoting exercise. Activities like underwater hockey, bicycle polo, and cardio-tennis combine two or more sports or fitness activities. Active games originally intended for children, like dodgeball and kickball, have become popular with adults.
Many companies, like Country Walkers, Backcountry Access, and Vermont Country Cyclers, offer “exercise tourism” featuring walking, skiing, cycling, or kayaking. Even electronic games are starting to promote exercise, like Dance-Dance Revolution and the suite of games accompanying the Nintendo Wii games system, getting gamers off the couch and moving.
Organized sports for children and youth in America have largely supplanted the games that kids used to organize and play on their own. Organized sports now start as early as age five and continue through high school, with the less talented gradually dropping out and turning to inactive pursuits, including excessive use of electronic media. Meanwhile, schools’ physical-education programs provide inadequate amounts of physical activity for good health, and more kids rely on motorized transport rather than walking or biking to school. All these trends converge as a major cause of the much discussed childhood obesity epidemic in America.
This focus on elite competitive sports participation rather than lifelong fitness has been particularly bad for girls. While Title IX of the Higher Education Amendments in 1972 caused a revolutionary increase in American girls’ sports participation, it also caused a disproportionate increase in injuries to girls who play sports.
Michael Sokolove, author of Warrior Girls: Protecting Our Daughters Against the Injury Epidemic in Women’s Sports (Simon and Schuster, 2008), has documented in heart-breaking fashion the epidemic of ligament tears and concussions in girl soccer players largely caused by playing too many games on too many teams year-round. A key point of the book is that political correctness gets in the way of reform of this unfortunate situation. Groups that ought to be loudly advocating reform are not doing so because of fear that their protest will lead to a retreat from the requirements of Title IX.
Fortunately, advocacy for and implementation of a saner approach to youth sports are starting to appear in disparate quarters. The Web site Momsteam (www.momsteam.com) provides a comprehensive clearinghouse of information for parents of children and youth in sports. Momsteam does not oppose organized youth sports; rather, it seeks to make them fun and inclusive so that they contribute positively to a child’s development.
There is plenty of evidence that physical activity helps children to learn better, but I am not confident that this evidence is enough to turn educational policy around. One reason is that, at least in the United States, the federal No Child Left Behind Act does not require students to meet minimum physical-fitness standards, as it does for reading and mathematics. Consequently, schools are reducing time spent on subjects other than reading and mathematics to assure that their students pass reading and mathematics tests.
The quality of sedentary home entertainment seems to improve continually with no end in sight, and objective time-use studies show that Americans choose to spend a lot of leisure time with electronic media. However, other forces are working against this trend, such as:
The popularity of pilates, yoga, and other gentler fitness activities results from a growing recognition that flexibility is one of the three types of essential fitness activities, along with cardiovascular endurance and muscular strength, especially as the U.S. population ages.
I believe that older people — those over age 45 — are already an anchor of the fitness movement. In my study “Global Aging and Sports: The Impact of Aging of the World’s Population on the World of Sports,” I found that, between 1993 and 2005, participation rates among people over age 45 were growing in many sports and fitness categories, even while total participation rates fell in some.
Also, while low-impact sports are certainly highly popular, more and more older people engage in strenuous activities as well. Age group competitions in events like marathons and senior games give people over 45 reason to train for and participate in events that they would not have considered a generation ago.
A countertrend to this aging-fitness movement may be fiscal rather than physical: People over 45 today, especially retirees over age 55, often can devote a lot of leisure time to sports and fitness because they have defined benefit pensions that guarantee income for life. However, defined benefit pensions are disappearing from private-sector retirement plans and are less generous for public-sector workers. Retiree health benefits, especially for those too young for Medicare eligibility, are also fast going away.
Children’s lack of fitness today is a big issue. If incidence of childhood obesity and diabetes continues to increase, as some dire predictions suggest, then significant numbers of tomorrow’s working-age adults will not be fit and will have limited ability to become fit. Parents will need to change their attitudes and practices to allow their children more time for free outdoor play, to encourage more walking and bicycling to school, to lobby schools and politicians for more and better physical education, and to fight for reform in children’s and youth sports.
For working-age adults, the issue is largely whether they will choose to devote enough of their leisure time to fitness for good health, and, if the long-term decline in smoking is any guide, there is reason for hope that they will gradually do so. Adults past working age also need to choose to devote part of their leisure to active pursuits, as many are already doing. However, without significant medical advances, the triad of old-age diseases — Alzheimer’s, osteoporosis, and diabetes — coupled with lack of financial resources and increasing caregiving responsibilities may prevent them from doing so to the extent they would like.
So, what if we do get a pill that simulates the effects of exercise? As recent research from the Salk Institute suggests, this possibility is no longer science fiction, though other researchers warn of the loss of other benefits of exercising.
A real test of whether the fitness revolution will culminate in a new pervasive social norm will be whether people continue to choose active leisure pursuits. People of the future may have a choice between taking long brisk walks or taking a pill and sitting on the couch, watching their favorite sitcom. The challenge may be to make moderate exercise at least as much fun as what’s on TV.
Kenneth W. Harris, a former policy analyst and manager for the Federal Aviation Administration, is chairman of the Consilience Group LLC and transportation field editor for Techcast.org. Among his reports on sports futures are “Global Aging and Sports” (2006) and “Physical Activity Trends” (2007). Web site www.theconsiliencegroup.com.