Exercising their health

Published 9:00 pm Saturday, September 25, 2004

LYNNWOOD – “What’s your resting heart rate?” 11-year-old Derik Ibay is asked.

Even out of gym class, he can rattle off his number with the ease some kids can recite Mariner Ichiro Suzuki’s latest hits total.

“Ninety-two,” he said.

Gym teacher Susan Sellers had asked Derik and other students in her Lynnwood Intermediate School PE class to go to four exercise stations, one in each corner of the room.

One exercise is named “frogger,” a fun name for what adults might recall as “squat thrusts.”

Students squat down like a baseball catcher, put their hands on the floor, kick back with their feet into a push-up position, return to the squat position and jump up.

Five times. A real heart thumper.

Next come cone hops.

Students jump back and forth over small orange cones similar to those at road construction projects.

Ten of those.

Jumping jacks are over in the far corner, 15 of them.

And finally, 20 reps of “mountain climbing.” Students lean down, balance their weight on their arms, which are stretched out on the floor in front of them, and alternately thrust back one leg, then the other.

When finished, the students run back to where they were sitting at the front of the gym and pass along an electronic pulse-measuring device. They put their hands over gold strips on each end of the pulse stick, which is about the size and shape of a track relay baton. It gives them an electronic readout of their post-exercise heart rate.

For Derik, it’s 183 beats a minute.

That’s three beats above 180, or the zone Sellers said students should try to keep their heart rates in as they exercise.

“If your heart rate is over 180, you don’t have to work that hard,” Sellers said.

Pulse monitors and training zones used to be the concepts adults paid money to learn at exercise clubs.

The Edmonds School District won a $293,116 federal Physical Education for Progress grant in 2002, and that money is paying for the pulse sticks. It’s also paying for $900 exercise bikes, strap-on heart-rate monitors and computerized fitness assessments.

The idea is to give kids the skills and knowledge they need to be active for life.

“With kids living in the technology age, we’re starting to use heart-rate monitors because of the amount of information it can give kids,” Sellers said. “The immediate feedback is great.

“Even a kid who doesn’t look overweight may not be able to handle the exercise level of somebody else because of a lack of fitness in their heart. A heart-rate monitor allows us to see that.”

Physical education is part of the fight

Lynnwood Intermediate School has joined the national battle against childhood obesity. Much of the battle is being waged in schools.

The stakes are high. Overweight kids have a greater risk of heart disease, high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes.

The number of overweight children is growing so rapidly that if the trend doesn’t stop, kids today won’t live as long as their parents, warned Dr. William Klish, a professor of pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.

“The fact is, (schools) have to help in this war on obesity,” said Nancy Chockley, president of the National Institute for Health Care Management in Washington, D.C. “What could be more important than this fight?”

Results from a study recently announced by Chockley’s organization show the impact school PE programs can have.

Children as young as 5 and 6 can benefit from just one extra hour of physical education a week, according to study findings. Young girls in kindergarten and first grade showed the greatest benefit.

Five hours of physical education a week for kindergarten girls would reduce the number of overweight young girls by 43 percent, the study found.

“It underscores that we need to intervene early,” Chockley said. “Really consistent exercise makes a huge difference in young children.”

Nationally, about a third of high school students are either overweight or at risk of being overweight, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

A more recent snapshot of how widespread childhood obesity is becoming at increasingly younger ages was provided in Arkansas. During the 2003-04 school year, the state required schools to take height and weight measurements of 440,000 students from pre-kindergarten to 12th grade.

Thirty-eight percent of Arkansas students were either overweight or borderline overweight.

About a third of kids entering kindergarten or first grade were overweight or weighed enough to be at risk of becoming overweight, according to the Arkansas Center for Health Improvement.

“It’s a huge number – shocking,” Chockley said.

Academic pressure

School districts tempted to increase PE requirements to battle childhood obesity are caught in another, conflicting trend: the produce-or-else pressure to raise student test scores.

The federal No Child Left Behind Act requires that all students meet or exceed state reading and math standards by the 2013-14 school year.

Districts eventually may face sanctions, such as being required to pay for tutoring, if student scores don’t improve enough.

“It’s hardball,” said state Superintendent of Public Instruction Terry Bergeson. “It’s created a tremendous amount of pressure that should not be on these schools.”

Kids need to “work hard and play hard,” she said.

Administrators are feeling test anxiety as well. The Tacoma School District, for example, recently reaffirmed its ban on recess periods for elementary school students other than at lunchtime, a policy first set in 1997.

However, classroom teachers can still opt to give kids recess at their discretion.

“The schools are under tremendous pressure to increase the academic performance of their children,” Chockley said.

The experience of both individual classroom teachers and statewide tests shows that fitness can affect student classroom performance.

Tests of 954,000 students in the fifth, seventh and ninth grades found that higher academic achievement was associated with higher levels of fitness, according to a December 2002 study by the California Department of Education.

In McMinnville, Tenn., a tiny town in central Tennessee with a median household income of $24,000 a year, fourth-grade teacher Deanna Smith began an experiment several years ago. Without grant money or special equipment, she found a way to improve the fitness of her students.

Twice each day, she leads students on 20-minute walks along a paved nature trail near Hickory Creek Elementary School.

Initially, she worried about the time the walks would take away from learning.

But after a few weeks, she began to see changes: fewer behavior problems and better work from students. Test scores improved. Reading gains were almost twice the state standards. Overall, her students’ test scores are higher than the school system average.

Now the walks have become so much a part of class routine that she notices a difference in student performance on the occasional days when instructional demands interfere with the walks.

“It’s not that they’re not willing to work, but it’s not the quality I get when we’re walking,” Smith said.

“There’s so much more to walking … than just the healthy part. If people only knew.”

Monitors set the pace

Not every student is like Mountlake Terrace High School junior Brandon Klimek. He trimmed 31/2 minutes off his one-mile run time last year – from just under 10 minutes to 6:30.

He also shed pounds, dropping from 190 to 155.

Part of reason for his success was the heart rate monitors the school received as part of its federal PE grant.

They “really helped me understand the (training) zones, keeping the heart rate up there,” Klimek said.

For many students, that’s a heart rate of 140 to 160 beats a minute.

The training zone concept taught by Mountlake Terrace PE teacher Susan Lahti is the same that co-worker Susan Sellers teaches at Lynnwood Intermediate School: Don’t push yourself too hard, stay at a comfortable workout pace.

Andrew Henning, a junior and member of the school’s cross-country team, learned the importance of that last year. The heart rate monitors helped him discover that instead of always trying to run faster, he was actually pushing himself a little too hard.

By slowing down slightly to stay within a comfortable heart-rate training zone, he cut the time of his 5-kilometer races from 16:48 last year to 16:32 this year.

“It’s the beginning of the season, and I have a lot to improve,” he said of his goal of even better times.

The Lynnwood school’s student workout room is equipped with six exercise bikes, heart rate monitors and a computerized program that assesses student fitness in strength, flexibility and speed on walks or runs – all paid for by grants. Adults can get access to this type of equipment only at special exercise classes or private gyms.

Yet, by the time they reach high school, Washington students are only required to have two years of PE.

With the childhood obesity crisis, some parents and educators are asking if the requirements should be increased, regardless of testing pressures on schools.

Jeff Carpenter, former supervisor for health and physical education in Bergeson’s office, doesn’t agree with that. “In practical terms, it might be difficult to require more,” he said.

Instead, he said students should be offered more PE classes they can take as electives, such as the ski and snowboard conditioning classes offered in the Olympia School District where he now works.

“We’ve got more kids who want into health and fitness classes than we have sections,” said Carpenter, an author of books on how to motivate kids to get more exercise through fun activities.

“Like I’ve said for years, if you build a program that meets the needs of kids, they’ll come.”

At Mountlake Terrace High School, Lahti has changed the name of her PE class to Fit for Life. She hopes it reflects the skills students can learn and demonstrates how they can choose a workout program that fits their needs, both now and in the future.

“She taught us how our muscles work, how to stay in shape,” said Paul Jackson, 16.

As he freshman, he could bench press 95 pounds. Two years later as a junior, he can do 165 pounds.

“Now I understand how to lift (weights) and what I need to be doing at the gym, rather than just going and lifting and not really seeing any improvement,” he said.

“I can take this with me the rest of my life,” he added, “how to work out and stay fit. And if I ever got out of shape, I would know what to do to get back into shape.”

Reporter Sharon Salyer: 425-339-3486 or salyer@heraldnet.com.