Word: gyms
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...raise academic standards has in many places squeezed even recess from the curriculum. Only 56% of U.S. high school students were enrolled in a phys-ed class as of the most recent survey, in 2003, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and only 28% have gym every day, down from 42% in 1991. And that's overall; the percentages among African-American and Hispanic kids are even lower...
...Americans stack up on those measures? No one knows. Assessing them requires treadmills, calipers, piles of gym equipment--and lots of money. The President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports used to conduct a national fitness survey of American schoolkids, but that hasn't happened since the mid-'80s. "No federal agency is interested in picking up the tab," says Russell Pate, a professor of exercise science at the University of South Carolina...
Church and many others believe there's a simple way for more Americans to get the activity their bodies need, and it doesn't require gym memberships or fancy equipment. The answer, they say, is walking. Unfortunately, most American communities were designed in the age of the automobile and aren't built for bipeds. "The U.S. probably has the lowest percentage of trips by biking and walking of any country," says psychologist Jim Sallis, director of the Active Living Research program at San Diego State University. Between 1977 and 1995, trips Americans made by walking declined 40%, even though...
...which they might. If anything, we will continue to eliminate physical effort. "Companies like Procter & Gamble are working hard to stop all the drudgery of cleaning and scrubbing," jokes Sallis. And while a small percentage of the nation--mainly found among the best-educated and wealthiest classes--are committed gym rats, most folks cannot find the time, energy and will power to regularly work out. "People are really motivated to avoid activity," Sallis observes...
...walk into the gym, and there they are, the cardio-bots, half human, half machine, eyes fixed on banks of televisions and ears glued to iPods as they scale imaginary mountains or jog down simulated country roads. How driven they seem, how profoundly self-conscious. Digital monitors strapped around their biceps register their blood pressures and heart rates as their tissues absorb L-glutamine-laced protein drinks that taste like the sort of thing computers would drink if computers got thirsty. And though there must be 30 cardio-bots, lifting their sinewy thighs in unison as their StairMasters and treadmills...