Benefits of Exercise for Children Tested

The Early Sport PE Effectiveness Testing Protocol

Conducted at:
Silver Mesa Elementary School
Jordan School District
State of Utah
Spring, 2003

Made Possible by Generous Donations from:
Polar Electro, Inc.
IASIS Healthcare Corporation

Developed and Performed by:
Early Sport Foundation and
Early Sport Properties, Inc.

Report by:
Nick Smith and Boyd L. Jentzsch

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The Early Sport PE Effectiveness Testing Protocol

Background
There is no standardized nor generally agreed upon methodology in the U.S. to test the effectiveness of grade school PE programs. This has led to a plethora of claims as to the relative value of PE programs with widely divergent methodologies. The original standard of PE effectiveness was set in the late 1950's when the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports established guidelines for awarding its certificates. Based on long established military models (from which this country's first PE programs were developed), these standards emphasized muscular strength (push-ups, sit-ups, pull-ups, etc.), ball throwing, and running (the one mile run). More recently, the Council added lifestyle awards (for engagement in regular physical activities like basketball, rollerblading, etc.).

Classic, "old style" PE routinely emphasizes the teaching of team sports, and is often criticized as "rolling out the ball" PE By contrast, what has become known as the "New PE" places its emphasis on children engaging in a wide variety of lifelong physical activities during PE (like rock wall climbing, weight training, and cardiovascular machines) rather than team sports. Considerable debate rages over the relative physical value to children from these competing teaching practices. With fewer and fewer grade schools having any type of regular PE at all (now only 8%, and dropping, according to the CDC), the intramural debate may soon be moot.

Central to this debate is the essential role of PE teachers. As budgetary cuts have eliminated thousands of PE teacher positions nationwide, grade schools are forced into choosing to have no PE at all, or asking regular classroom teachers or unpaid volunteers to assume that role, in spite of their admitted lack of proper training.

While all these issues are being played out, the nation is getting fatter. Childhood obesity rates have tripled, and overweight rates have doubled in the last 20 years. What was once known as the "Deadly Quartet" of metabolic diseases, now called the metabolic syndrome (upper body obesity, glucose intolerance/type 2 [adult onset] diabetes, hypertension, and hypertriglyceridemia/cardiovascular disease) have now become major childhood diseases, with type 2 diabetes being the fastest growing childhood disease in America. This year the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention projected that a child born in 2000 has a 1 in 3 chance of getting diabetes in their lifetime, 1 in 2 if non-Caucasian.

What is known about all of these diseases is that they are lifestyle related, with the lack of regular exercise a major contributing factor. While the steady decline of physical activity away from schools is contributing to these accelerating Early Chronic Disease (ECD) problems, the role of schools in helping to correct them, while assumed to be of significance, has never been directly addressed in the literature.

In the Spring of 2003, Early Sport Foundation and Early Sport Properties, Inc., which have created a free PE program for regular elementary school teachers to administer to their students, conducted a PE effectiveness protocol test at Silver Mesa Elementary, Jordan School District, State of Utah. The purposes of this protocol test were:

Developing and testing a standardized method of evaluating the effectiveness of PE programs based upon the use of medically recognized bio-markers for the detection of ECD.
Determining whether a PE program designed to maintain elevated heart rates (50% or more of a class period) can effect positive changes in recognized bio-markers for detection of ECD.
Measuring the effectiveness of the Early Sport program as a first test of this protocol.

The basic assumption of this protocol test is that, while there are many important reasons for the conducting of regular PE classes in elementary schools, one major factor must be the prevention or attenuation of ECD syndrome in children. By this standard, all PE programs can, and should be measured, and compared, no matter whether "old" or "new" PE, or whether taught by a PE professional or classroom teachers or volunteers. In fact, with data showing the ECD prevention values of PE programs, additional financial resources could be justifiably directed toward the reestablishment of PE programs in elementary schools - justifying it in both political terms (reducing present and future medical costs to governments), and human terms (reducing the cost of lost lives, wages, and human potential, while improving quality of life and lengthening it).