Transcript

Shortcomings of School Physical Education | Don Melrose | TEDxSST Corpus Christi Youth

[Music] If you've taken a look at the national statistics on health and fitness across this country, one of the things you're going to find out real fast is that we spend more on health costs, fitness, exercise, dietary aids, and supplements than any other country on the planet. That includes mental health. But at the same time, we're also one of the least healthy units on the entire globe. So, one of the things that you're going to find out, which is the basis for what I'm doing today, is that we don't come with an owner's manual. And as such, we have missed multiple opportunities in our world realistically to teach people about lifespan, health, and fitness. So, this is part of the problem. So, where should we be learning these things? Right off the top, it starts in the home. Parents, future parents, one of the things you got to learn right away is that what you model in the home is what your kids will repeat from the standpoint of what you eat, from the standpoint of how you move. I have experienced this myself in my own house. I have two kids in college, one graduating in two days. And so to that extent kind of like Ali spoke about shortly or recently is that we have poor fitness literacy which is narrowly defined as how well we adhere to basic exercise expectations from the standpoint of aerobic fitness and resistance training highly related to that anxiety and motivation. Everybody's got some anxiety these days but we don't know what's normal anymore. What we do know is that motivation is the backbone for all exercise activity. And if you were ever to look up anything related to fitness, your social media is going to be flooded with a lot of information. Much of it very poor information. The real skill is knowing how to cut through it and get to the best type of information that you might need. So over the last 30 years of doing this, I've run into a number of situations in which the most educated people you could possibly ever be around, including physicians, forget the most basic concepts of anatomy and physiology and how people work. So right off the top, you invited an academic, you're going to get a quiz. So true or false, cosmetic and health-based fitness um can be used the same way. And the answer to that is false. You see, I can work to make myself healthy at the cost of my health. I can use any number of drugs to make that happen. That's part of the problem. Very rarely do you come up on somebody and they say, "I just want to be healthy." What they say is, "I want to look good." And that is within itself part of the problem. What people don't realize is that if we start off by seeking health first, the cosmetic, how good you look, will come in short order. So, one has to go before the other, but you don't want to get it backwards. Weight loss due to sweating indicates fat loss. I just had a a long talk about this with physicians recently. You've probably seen it. Fat does not seep out your pores. Matter of fact, you don't see it, hear it, feel it, smell it because it's basically transported from a fat cell and ends up in your muscle where it's broken down chemically to give you energy. But it doesn't come out your pores. That's sweat. That's water. If sweat, if fat actually did come out your pores, you would probably be greasy after a workout rather than just a little wet and maybe smell a little funny. Okay, so what this leads us to is very poor practices. I kid you not, at 2:06 this afternoon coming down Ocean Drive, I saw somebody wearing a set of these solar suits, sauna suits, over top of a set of sweats. This is the fastest way to lead to heat exhaustion, heat stroke, dehydration, and even death. Matter of fact, I can't even figure out why they're still legal. All right? Because fat and sweat are not the same thing. You will lose weight this way, but you are not losing fat. And this is the very simple facts that we miss. Physicians miss this. Okay? So, this is kind of the way that goes. Here's another one we run into with high frequency. As an older person, I can work out like I did when I was 18. So, let's say that I'm 45 or 50, and I'm a little older than that, but I'm 75 lbs beyond where I was the last time I worked out. So, now I decide to go out and I go running like I did when I was 18, but I haven't done anything for 20 or 25 years. So, now every step that goes down onto the ground or I have ground reaction forces coming right back up my leg. It's only a short amount of time before I have foot, ankle, knee, hip, soft tissue injuries, you name it. And now I can't exercise at all. and I'm in a bad place. So I have to have something that's very appropriate for my stage in life and for what I haven't had been doing. That's part of the skill. And so that is false. A standard exercise format can be used for all people. False. But that doesn't stop personal trainers from doing that. So here's what I want you to think about. I could probably teach most of you how to put together a routine and you'd probably be relatively okay at it right out of the box, but you couldn't use that for a person who is like we commonly see here in Corpus Christi. All right, we have obesity. Okay, we have diabetes. We might have cardiovascular things, maybe hypertension, high blood pressure, and maybe an orthopedic issue. Do you know what happens when you take that person and this is so common in that combination and you use an exercise program that could be used for an apparently healthy person and let's say now that we have medications on board that actually change the way the heart rate and the blood pressure respond to exercise normally. We can't do that. We have to be much more intentional with what we do in that neighborhood. So here's your obesity street cred. Now when we talk about obesity in this country, one thing you want to know is that it's all based on the body mass index. And the body mass index is roughly the medical way of defining excessive accumulation of body fat. Okay? So according to this, if you are heavy for your height and you have a high index number, you are obese. So right now you're looking at a guy that's 5 foot n 220 pounds. My body mass index is 30. And that's the opening range of class one obesity. But if you look at it from the exercise standpoint where we actually measure what you're made of, body fat percentage, now we defined it at the point in which your body fat becomes a liability to your health. That being said, my body fat does not rise to that level. But here's what you got to know. The vast majority of the population does not work out or exercise. So BMI is highly related to all known causes of mortality, that which will kill you. And the scale of BMI and the scale of body fat percentage are not the same. Roughly 25% for a male is the point in which body fat becomes a liability for a male. For a female 32 to roughly 35%. Okay? So that's where it puts us. Now we look at that from the standpoint of obesity. Now obesity we usually talk about it again all BMI driven. Okay, in this country because physicians don't know how to do body compositions. This is what you have to understand. So when we talk about obesity, the average adult overweight and obese is about 70% in this country right now. How many of those are are actually obese? About 40%. Okay. The remainder are simply overweight. Children between the ages of roughly 6 and 19, range between 20 and 23% obese in this country. Those numbers are rising. Right now, the number one killer in this country is cardiovascular disease. women, you're leading the way. All right, so just something to really consider. And type two diabetes contributes a lot to cardiovascular disease in all of this. So really what this does for us, it puts us on the old treadmill. Okay, this is my own graph. So, I didn't get it from anywhere, but realistically, you take any lifestyle and health issue. You go to your physician, they give you medication, and over time, your symptoms are going to reduce. But then yet, that medication eventually will have some kind of side effects. And that side effect will usually lead to you going to your doctor again to get more medic medication to deal with the side effects from the original medication that you have. The problem is is that nowhere in this graphic do you see anything about lifestyle modification and taking care of yourself using physical activity. If that were the case, this would cease to be round and we'd have a stop off somewhere and it wouldn't come back around. The vast majority of the problems plaguing us are health style, health and lifestyle related. The things we failed to do, the things we failed to teach. So let's look at this from another standpoint like the mental and motivational. There's a lot of misconceptions here. Now, in my world as a professor and a dean, I get a lot of people that will come to my office and they'll say, "Dr. Melrose, I can't be in the classroom with that person or that professor. I can't do this assignment. I can't do that type of thing. Make them give me an alternative assignment." And I'm thinking to myself, well, I asked them, do you know that it's really, really common for everybody to experience anxiety in their life? And I kid you not, the answer is, wait, what? Okay. So, anxiety is a normal part of what we do. And how that affects exercise, let me tell you, it's huge. If you've ever heard the term social physique anxiety, social physique anxiety is basically where you're so worried about what other people might be thinking about you working out or being in an exercise setting that you cease or fail to take care of yourself. And you let that be the thing that keeps you from being healthy for a lifespan. Brings me to the next point. You're all working on these great careers. Many of you in science and tech and STEM and things like that. You get what happens when you spend more than 20 years of your life preparing for that. But at the same time, you get to the point in your world where you're too sick, don't have any energy, you're taking a lot of medications, you're broken down, you failed to take care of yourself. All right? So, we have to learn how to do this. Can exercise attenuate the symptoms of things like clinical depression and anxiety? The answer is a resounding yes. In many cases, as good as some medications. Please don't leave here and say that I said that it cures it. Always somebody who does. Didn't say that. Here's what I will tell you is that if you have a lot of anxiety and depression and you're not including exercise in your treatment plan, this is a problem. You see, it's never been about how much anxiety we experience. It's all about how learn to cope with it. And if you've never been taught to cope with it, then we simply don't. Some of us find uh anxiety to be very facilitative. It brings us to our next best level and many others will interpret it as very negative and it's debilitative. So we need to learn the skills to be able to take care of that just a little bit better. So when we think about this from the standpoint of what gets us to exercise in the first place, exttrinsic motivation is usually why we get started. We get involved with something something motivated. Maybe it's that wedding day. Maybe it's that class reunion. Maybe it's a special occasion. Maybe it's something you saw. The problem is, or maybe it's the weight on the bathroom scale. The problem is when you achieve your goal, it usually doesn't sustain you. All right. What you need is something intrinsic that gets you up out of bed in the morning or gets you up after work in the evening when you'd rather just sit and play with your phone and waste a lot more time. It's that which gets you moving because you know that you want to do it for a lifetime. And here's the thing, anxiety also has one more negative effect. And that is simply is that if we ever experience one of those points in times in life with exercise where we have to take care of something a little bit more important in that week and we backslide on our exercise, well, guess what happens? We tend to at that point we start to think, well, I'm not good enough. I can't do this consistently and so I should quit. This is the wrong idea because the mo the best people at it have to deal with that. I'm living proof. All right. So, this is how that works. So, what can we do to win this war? Just to wrap this up. Okay. Number one, everything starts in the home. You have to model that behavior. And you can start it even if it's never been modeled in your home. This is the beauty of it. We need to think about having a stronger emphasis, more deliberate emphasis on fitness in our physical education classes. We do a lot of age appropriate things, but we'd like to be able to take it to the next level. Number three, we want to teach lifespan fitness at all levels of education, kind of like we do in college. Okay? And finally, we want to teach people about mental health as a benefit to exercise. In my world specifically, I've seen people taking lots of medications who get really physically active, lose 50 pounds, and they don't take any more medications, especially for anxiety and depression and things like that. Matter of fact, my son did it. Okay? So, I've seen plenty of others. This is just one story on top of many. Thank you for having me here today and think about what your exercise habits are and how you can be better for a lifetime. Thank you. [Music]