School Fitness/Testing in your country

H

heartofberries

New member
So I was recently listening to a podcast and they were going over the US Presidential Fitness Test that they give kids K-12 in the States. And one of their points was that there's a moral panic every few years about how bad US kids are at these basic things compared to kids in Europe. (Like sit-ups, pull ups, sit and reach) They said that one thing that contributed to the bad results were that US Schools mostly focused on sports for fitness and didn't practice things like sit-ups, but schools in Europe were much more callisthenic based, and so it wasn't so much a marker or fitness, but whether or not it was a thing you DID regularly. (Which frankly doesn't match my memories of MANY sit-ups etc)

So for those of you who DIDN'T grow up in the US... is that true? What was school fitness education like in your country, and did you have any kind of national standardized test for it? Was it awful?

(P.S. I'd rather not get into anything about whether kids are or aren't fitter in one country or another, or vs a different time period. I'm just curious about what Physical Education looks like in other countries)
 
@heartofberries Singapore here - we got graded for sports too via NAPFA (equivalent of the Presidential Fitness Test). But honestly our society is so grades-driven it is implicitly acknowledged that for the most part sports won’t bring you anywhere. So in years where students have national exams eg 6th, 10th, 12th grade, it’s not uncommon to have some physical education lessons replaced by regular subject lessons (!). We do train for NAPFA close to the testing period though and beyond that for PE we would play games or learn dances.
 
@heartofberries Alright I'm a little late but here's my experience as a Frenchwoman.

schools in Europe were much more callisthenic based
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Meh. At least for France it's not particularly true. In middle school and high school, we practiced a new sport (more or less, sometimes the same could come back from a year to another) every term. So for instance during the fall term we'd have basketball, winter term gymnastics and spring term running. We might learn calisthenics when we'd have gymnastics I guess, but honestly my teachers were terrible at teaching anything gymnastics related. I have a pretty bad memory of it. Never did pull-ups nor sit-ups though.

In middle school I had pretty bad teachers who didn't bother teaching us good technique, or barely. I remember running in my first year of middle school (no idea of the equivalent for the US, sorry), I was absolutely terrible at it and our teacher would yell at us if we stopped to walk. We had to run without stopping for 20 to 30 minutes, even for kids who had barely run before. Really stupid and dangerous when you think about it.

It was a bit better in high school though. I had a great teacher in junior year who actually taught us stuff, which helped me a bit in my senior year to pass the test.

did you have any kind of national standardized test for it?
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Yes. In middle school we were graded for PE just like any other subject. In high school too, but on our last year of high school we have a national exam in France. You might have heard of it, it's called the baccalauréat (bac for short). PE is part of it, we are assigned 3 sports (personally, I had 3 options to choose from but they all sucked) at the beginning of our senior year and we "train" for it during class (2 hours a week, not much) for the current term. We are tested at the end of the term on our last class. The test is standardized across the country.

So for me, on the fall term I had swimming, basically we were timed and depending on our time we were assigned a grade. I personally found the test to be pretty hard, I was never a very fast swimmer and 2 hours a week wasn't enough for me to train to get a good grade. I didn't have the time to train at other times (nor did I want to, honestly). I did progress a lot during the 3 months I trained in class, but not enough to get a decent grade.

Obviously this is my own experience, maybe there are better teachers is better schools. I went to school in the countryside in meh to bad schools (particularly middle school) so maybe it was better in cities.
 
@heartofberries UK and I think my experience of PE class is echoes what others from the UK have said. Was in high school between 2007-2013 and PE was mandatory for the first 5 years regardless of whether you chose PE as a subject for GCSE level (Year 10-11).

In year 7 we did the bleep test which was awful and humiliating depending on how early you were out. We were a co-ed school but PE was done separately for boys and girls. I can't account for whether there was a big difference in what we were taught but I definitely never played football and I doubt the boys ever played netball.

I remember very early on there was a clear divide between the girls who were good at sport, who were on the school football and netball teams and actually enjoyed sports day versus the rest of us. The teachers always favoured these girls and unlike other subjects, there was no concept of improving or moving for your health or because it felt good. It definitely felt like you were either naturally good or not. We also had something called 'sports scholars' in my school who had special kits and did extra curricular activities. They were also invited after school when our new sports hall was opened by Dame Jessica Ennis!

In terms of what we actually learnt, there was a huge variety of sports - I remember hockey, rounders, netball, dance, trampolining (that was a fun term!). I remember doing circuit training once which included sit ups. Usually we would pick a sport and learn it over a term. I remember it being fairly dull as we'd spend ages learning technique and hardly any time playing. If our teachers weren't around and we had to have a cover lesson, that's when we would sit in a classroom and learn about muscles and physiology. We did athletics leading up to sports day which included pole vault, javelin, shot-put, hurdles, sprinting, long-distance running. Everyone had to take part in at least one event on sports day.

GCSE level is where more standardisation comes in as teens have chosen to do that subject for a certificate in Year 10-11. GCSE students learnt the fitness and science aspect of PE (I think, I didn't do it so please shout if I'm wrong!). Non-GCSE students had to still do PE once a week due to government guidelines. This was the best experience I had of PE in high school because all of the girls who were keen at sports had been filtered out to the GCSE class and the teachers didn't care that much about us/didn't have to teach us so we just got to play whatever sport we wanted. At A-Level (Year 12-13) if you wanted to continue from GCSE, there would be more of the science aspect and there were no mandatory classes for anyone not actively studying PE as a subject.

Overall, I wasn't particularly good at PE and I am so mad that there wasn't more of an emphasis on learning how to be fit to be healthy rather than arbitrarily being good at sports. In the UK over half of girls stop doing sports as teenagers. We even had a huge campaign a few years ago to encourage women and girls to exercise. It was actually really cool cause it showed women of all ages, shapes and sizes doing a variety of sports. So no, I don't think we're a particularly good example of teaching fitness.
 
@heartofberries US here! I was fortunate to go to a high school that was big on athletics and had a weight room. We had choices in PE classes, and throughout high school I lifted weights every semester for 1 hour before school. I think it was mostly supposed to be a class for the football players, but there was a group of 4 of us girls that lifted together every day. All 4 of us were in different after school sports. It was actually great, the football guys were very encouraging and we were lucky to have a coach that taught us good form. It was what got me into weight lifting in the first place! I vaguely remember doing some of the standardized tests like toe touch, high jump, sit ups, but we would do it in small groups (for me, just the gals I lifted with) so it was never a big deal.

The other classes our school offered were things like yoga, power walking, calisthenics, and general PE. I think they were only required for 2 semesters (?). Since the weights class was mostly for athletes though, a lot of people took it for all 8 semesters of high school. Which was cool, because then we were around each other for a long time and you got really comfortable with the people in your class.

That being said, I feel like I got a good “PE” education because we were lucky to have a good coach who helped us set goals and access to equipment. It literally had nothing to do with the standardized tests!
 
@heartofberries I grew up in Mexico. Physical Education up until 6th grade was mostly calisthenics, with a week of sports every month. I did a lot of bodyweight fitness during the pandemic and a lot of the movements I thought I'd never done before I realized I actually did back then. This was 3x a week.

Between 7th and 9th grade it was a 2x/week thing, and it was always either kickball or a sport, in two month cycles: two months of track and field, two months of basketball, two months of softball, two months of volleyball, I don't remember what the others were (not soccer, which is all I cared about).

Sometimes we would also watch Hallmark movies about anorexia.

Edit: we had fitness tests in primary school that consisted of:
  • height
  • weight
  • 400m sprint
  • five laps around the gym (couple of miles?)
  • push-ups
 
@heartofberries I got you fam.

Fat kid still is but we're doing something about it.

So here's the background. Moved to the US from 2016 from the Philippines. I've played sports all my life but not really competitively. So I might be athletic but I munch on food a lot. So there's that.

Anyway, the philippine curriculum is not only for PE. They put music/art/culture/and PE together. So not really PE. We learn history, sports, and do some sports but not really like everyday or every other day. In short, PE is seen as second class. Not really a class. Philippine curriculum focuses significantly more on the academic side(STEM).

So here is me 16 year old, chubby, and just sent on my first mile run. I've never ran a mile in my life. We jogged a kilometer, sure. But even that was hard for me. I had asthma when I was younger so it was a bit harder. Now I only have exercise induced asthma exacerbated by the cold but it only flares up when I exert a lot over some period of time. Say 3 hours of tennis practice and it's getting chilly at 7 pm and I start to cough and wheeze.

Anyway, I did good in PE. Or well, I tried my best. And outside PE, I ran miles after school. So I went from not being able to run a mile. To 15 minutes. Then before the school year ended, my best was 8:08. i was damn proud of it XD then it all went downhill from there.

now I'm a powerlifter and it's a common joke that powerlifters are just fat people who don't do cardio who lifts a lil bit. LOL im fine with that. food is life. but yeah. that's my story.

one thing i'd say tho is yes, the american pe is based more for sports but they never really train how to train for the long term.
 
@heartofberries European here. We had different tests throughout school, and yeah we did most of the exercises featured in those tests regularly. We had a mixture of (team) sports and calisthenics. When the weather was nice we'd run outside, play football, ski/ice skating in the winter etc.

It also varies from country to country, probably - I know some exercises/tests were mandatory, part of the curriculum. We mainly did and were tested for certain running times (60m, 1000m etc), and we had to do some sit-up/push-up containing tests as well. These tests were the same pretty much every year and the teacher compared it to your previous results to determine your grade.
 
@heartofberries Austrian🇦🇹here! Not yet graduated so still very much involved in our school system. Our P.E. lessons from elementary school on all looked pretty much the same - playing random ball games all the time with the occasional short run. About once a year we do a test how fast we can sprint, how far we can jump/throw... without any preparation.

Almost none of the female students are able to do even a single pushup and while most of the boys can do a few, they have terrible form and the majority of them can’t do pullups. (I do calisthenics in my free time and as far as i know, i am the only girl at my school that can do both pushups and pullups.)

Short rant: As i am really interested in fitness and health, i‘m horrified by the outdated knowledge our P.E. (and science) teachers have on strength, sports and nutrition, e.g. „carbs make you fat“, „women should stick to cardio“... yk, stuff like that. It makes me angry that even our school books contain those kinds of long-debunked myths.

Either way, I can only speak for Austria, but we definitely do not have a more calisthenics-based approach to P.E. - instead, I‘d dare to say that we‘re even worse off than the US in regards to sports because there you can at least run track and field, do college wrestling etc.
 
@heartofberries I think it's important to remember that the study that showed American kids were bad at calisthenics compared to others in the world was done in the 1940's. At the time, it was more common around the world for kids to stand in lines and do synchronized calisthenics as a form of physical activity, while in america sports were more common. But after World War II, there was a general world-wide push towards the play-sports focused Phys Ed classes because synchronized calisthenics kinda felt like some nazi shit.
 
@heartofberries So I was/am a teacher in elementary schools France, my school district/city was pretty low income and didn’t get a lot of resources... physical education/gym for one of my schools (lower income) was literally just me telling kids to run around and do frog hops and stuff with no equipment available, while my other school with more $ got to send kids off campus and had a dedicated gym teacher.
 
@heartofberries I'm from the US and now that I've become more involved in fitness as an adult, I look back and realize what a mess "Phys Ed" classes are. From my experience, we were just largely taught how to play different sports and were forced to play in class. I remember in middle school we were required to keep an activity log during the week, but if people weren't involved in sports, it could be hard.

We weren't actually taught fitness education. It would've been so helpful to learn how to properly execute basic exercises (with weightlifting being included in high school) and then how to create a workout routine and tailor it to your specific goals. It would've saved me a lot of headache and frustration when just starting out because I wasn't seeing the results I wanted or because it was so much harder to get in shape when you don't have any sort of athletic base.

Athletics are great, but I think a large problem occurs when people graduate from high school or college and no longer have practices, conditioning sessions, and competitions to keep them active.
 
@heartofberries Philippines here! I've mostly been in private schools so I'm not sure if this is the standard everywhere, but we never had a national fitness test. Our PE was usually just play this sport for a couple of weeks, then switch to another sport.

In highschool our PE was even lumped together with Music, Arts, and Health education in one subject (MAPeH), so we usually only had PE one day out of the week. And I'm asthmatic as well so I never really got to participate in a lot of the more intense sports (e.g. volleyball) my classmates got to try out.
 
@heartofberries I'm from Argentina. My PE classes boiled down to alternating between volleyball and handball, plus a couple of classes where we ran, did push ups and the like. Never had any real instruction for any of those things, we just split up in teams and played. The last years of middle/first of high school we had to put together a dance routine to present at the end of the year, that's as original as classes got
 
@heartofberries It was so odd, as an American who was incredibly fit as an elementary school kid and yet also terrible at nearly all the sports they taught. I'd be hanging around in the back hoping nobody would notice me during dodgeball and just halfheartedly give a kick during kickball so they could go ahead and get my out, but as soon as those tests came around, I beat every kid in my class, boys included. It's almost like the strength and conditioning work I did five days a week as a dancer and gymnast had more impact on my fitness than being handed a badminton racquet and told to go to town; shocking!

It wasn't until 11th grade that I finally had a PE teacher who focused on fitness. It was an opt-in class where we lifted heavy on Mondays and Wednesdays, did cardio on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and had lectures on health and fitness on Fridays. And everything we did, our teacher did with us. Total respect for that guy.

I'm kinda disabled now. Can't run two steps without destroying my knees, my elbows won't allow me to do even one push up or pull up, and my hip will give out if I stand for too long. But I'm glad I got some fitness advice that wasn't related to being competitive or attractive before my body finally pooped out on me.
 
@heartofberries I'm from the Midwest US and you'd think we'd have some pretty ass backwards physical education, but I think my school actually did a great job at it. Maybe it was all due to our boss ass bitch of an elementary PE teacher - shouts out Mrs. Peet - who is a mom of 3 and ran marathons while pregnant. I actually just looked up her profile through the school and she's still as awesome as I remember:

"My goal as an educator is to give all students opportunities and experiences that will develop healthy bodies and promote positive attitudes towards a lifetime of physical activity. Fundamental movements, skill progression, physical fitness, teamwork and sportsmanship are critical components to accomplishing these goals."
Click to expand...

We did do the Presidential Fitness Test up through grade 8, but we had plenty of preparation for it. We had ropes and cargo nets and a peg board to climb, regularly ran miles, even learned the very basics of yoga and karate. We occasionally played all the other sports and stuff too, but I don't ever remember focusing on sports until we were a bit older - maybe grades 6-12? And by the time we graduated we didn't have any tests except a timed mile once a year.
 
@heartofberries I’m in Canada and the only fitness testing we had was in gym where we ran around the track for 12 minutes to see how many laps we could complete. I have no idea what the point was and it was all self-reported so I can’t imagine it was very accurate either.

The kids who did the best in it were always the ones (probably unsurprisingly) who were competitive athletes outside of school because, as you suggested, we didn’t do any kind of anything resembling endurance training in gym. We played all kids of games and did all kinds of activities and then all of a sudden once a quarter you were told to run until the teacher blew their whistle.

The day itself was always dreaded but once it was over we didn’t really hear about collective “results” or anything.
 
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