Students learning fitness skills for the future

Country music fills the gymnasium as dozens of seventh-grade girls and boys prepare for their workout.

They split to two opposite ends of the gymnasium into gender groups - boys to the south wall, girls to the north - and begin using the first seat of the bleachers as a stationary Stairmaster.

Up, up. Down, down.

Up, up. Down, down.

Their legs move in near-unison; their toned calf muscles suggest they're familiar with this exercise.

Coaching them along are physical education teachers Kenny Gand and Hallie Johnson, who, for the past 1½ years, have made it their priority to revitalize physical education at Rochester (Ill.) Junior High School.

Gone are the days when dodge ball ruled and the school's top athletes dominated the activities in physical education classes. Now, the workouts at some local schools any student of any ability level can do - and continue with beyond a structured setting.

"What you see here, you won't see in a lot of P.E. classes," said Principal Scott Riddle, who was visiting the class.

He's referring to plyometrics, a form of exercise that builds power and speed that seventh- and eighth-grade students do one day a week instead of sitting in health class, which replaces their daily P.E. class this quarter.

Riddle said he gives full credit to Gand and Johnson for the new approach to physical education after they approached him nearly two years ago about making the curriculum more progressive.

Because junior-high students are at such an impressionable age and because of the growing childhood obesity epidemic, the teachers' goal was to teach students exercises and build skills that will keep them healthy for a lifetime.

Plyometrics involves stressing and stretching certain muscles so they grow and tone, and many of the exercises can be done without equipment.

The results have been "amazing," Gand said.

"Some of them would say it's torture, but now that they've bought into it, they're seeing improvements - all of them," he said. "So they really stopped complaining."

Seventh-graders Megan Freveletti and Nick Murphy, both student athletes, said they've noticed how the exercises have helped them improve their athleticism.

"It hurts," said Nick, a basketball and baseball player, "but it helps - that's all I've got to say. I can jump a lot higher now. I'm more in shape than I've ever been. It's pretty good; I like it."

Megan, who plays basketball, soccer, softball and runs track, said she was scared about the approach at first because she thought it would be hard.

"But it's actually OK," she said. "It gives me a really good workout, especially when I'm not doing a sport. And since I'm doing it with my friends, they encourage me to keep going."

Gand and Johnson said lifelong fitness is an issue that all physical education teachers should address with students.

The two also focus on healthy nutrition in health class and keep tabs on what the students are eating for lunch. They also offer activities such as basketball tournaments for students to participate in after eating lunch.

Though the idea of teaching lifelong physical activity isn't new to many in the field, it's a somewhat slow-moving concept in schools. Unless a physical education teacher takes the lead to change, classes tend to remain focused on organized team sports and other group activities, which often keep students waiting on the sidelines.

While there is nothing wrong with including traditional activities, the way teachers implement them should be transformed, said Deb Garrahy, Ph.D., program director for the physical education-teacher education program at Illinois State University.

"If you teach them in the traditional way, you're not going to have physically active kids," she said.

Her suggestion: Eliminate the elimination. Teachers should move away from games involving students sitting on the sidelines - such as dodge ball - and should find ways to keep kids moving during physical education.

"You can't tell us kids will be physically active if they will be eliminated from an activity," she said. "You can take any activity and triple the activity time so that kids are constantly moving, getting their heart rates up. It's just the design of the activity."

That's the approach Melanie Ostermeier has taken for more than five years as physical education teacher at Lincoln Magnet School, a junior high in Springfield, Ill.

In 1999, Ostermeier said she recognized the need to emphasize fitness and individual sports. She wrote grants for recreational games and aerobics equipment and connected with at least three other similarly minded district physical education teachers. By 2001, she'd obtained more than $350,000 in grants.

"We were going to use sports and games and those skills as a way to promote fitness rather than promote a lot of competition," she said. "We wanted to get away from 15 kids sitting on the stage while 10 kids played basketball."

With the new equipment, which included heart-rate monitors for students and a machine that calculates body-mass index, flexibility and strength, Ostermeier re-organized physical education activities.

She created stations that focus on improving muscular strength and endurance, cardio fitness and body mass. And she took a "small team-small court" approach to team sports, such as setting up four basketball courts instead of one so all students could play simultaneously.

"Everybody's active and nobody's sitting out," she said. "And our kids, they really don't keep track so much of the score than their heart rate."

Students are graded based on how long the student exercised and how long they were in their target heart-rate zone. Because Lincoln Magnet is a tech school, seventh-grade students use their laptop computers to complete a project that focuses on a fitness component or exercise on which they want to improve.

Other junior-high and elementary schools in the district also are taking the same approach to P.E. Students in grades 1-3 use pedometers, and heart-rate monitors are introduced in fourth grade. By fifth grade, students are used to wearing the monitors, and understand their purpose and how they work, Ostermeier said.

The key to her program being so successful, she said, has been administrative and parent support. And, the kids bought into the program.

"Even the kids that don't like putting on the heart-rate monitors or wish they were playing full-court basketball - they get it," she said. "They know that this is going to help them down the road.

"They bite the bullet, and they get busy."

Kelsea Gurski can be reached at 788-1526.