School Fitness/Testing in your country

[jayannedgar5]

@wintermint I hated that hang so much. I could not hang straight down to save my life, I would always rotate under the bar and then the pe teacher would yell at me that I wans't doing it right. What is the point of doing a flexed arm hang? Dudes don't do that exercise, as far as I was concerned it was an impossible exercise designed to make girls feel like crap.

 

[mmiller]

@heartofberries Singaporean here! We have a school fitness test. Used to be held every year with pull-ups, sit-ups, standing broad jump, sit and reach, a shuttle run and a 2.4km run. Now I think it's every other year.

Physical Education (PE) classes could be either games the teachers taught, whatever we felt like playing, or actual training for the test. That means lots of running around the track in groups, doing push-ups and stuff like that. Girls had to do it too.

You'd get graded on your performance but the only thing it really affected was for the guys when they got conscripted. Basically the less fit you were before going in, the longer you spent in basic training.

Fun fact, the only difference between the school test and the military test was the latter removed sit and reach. (That was in the 90s, the tests have changed since)

 

[kesoww]

@mmiller Are you kidding me, every other year?! They have it good these days... I remember most of the time I just loitered around because no one wanted me on their team lol. It was always captains ball (UGH of course everyone else loved it), volleyball, football, field hockey, badminton, basketball... All the ball and team sports... And my hand eye coordination was the worst. Only when I went to uni I realized I just am not suited to team sports and ball sports.

 

[jackster]

@mmiller from singapore too, can confirm. also, hi to another sinkie on this lovely sub!

for my school at least, we had modules of specific sports to be taught, rather than being whatever they'd fancied. these included tennis, soccer,,baseball, gymnastics, etc - but of course at a very introductory level with beginner equipment. it was particularly boring for me when it involved a sport i didn't like!

and when the fitness testing season came about, our PE lessons would be structured about training for those. oh god, how i hated doing physical training in the blistering hot 35• sun. (this is why i prefer to gym always, & i can't wait for gyms to reopen here.)

 

[mmiller]

@jackster hi there! Yeah i remember the softball "lesson", which consisted of all of us taking turns swinging the bat and missing horribly.

 

[1tommytom]

@heartofberries I'm from the UK and in our PE classes we only ever played sports, mostly netball and rounders (I'm not sure if this is a thing outside of England?? It's a bit like baseball) for girls and football for boys. We never did anything like calisthenics. When I got to secondary school (age 11-16) we did some gymnastics type things and a bit of running but mostly I remember just team sports.

 

[warrior97]

@1tommytom Ditto! I remember our school was pretty good at teaching you the basics for things, like tactics in sports but it was definitely a term based around a sport itself rather than general 'fitness'. I have a vague recollection of doing sprint tests in Primary school, but I feel like that was more just for fun than something that we'd get graded on or anything. Think I didn't do a sit up until high school when we did a term in an actual gym-gym (as opposed to the school 'gym' hall or the playing fields) and learnt how to use the machines and things. I hated that term! Way more fun to play a match.

 

[hoorayitsme]

@1tommytom Same here! We did hockey winter term, netball spring term and rounders/athletics summer term every year for my entire school career. No training and minimal supervision. I hated hockey especially because it was essentially giving all the mean girls a weapon to whack you in the ankles with. It made me hate sport and never try anything athletic again for over ten years.

 

[cg828]

@1tommytom Same, quite a lot of team sports! Netball and rounders were very common but we also did tennis, squash and dance.

It was pretty easy to skip class, too...I don't think I did any PE sessions in the last 2 years of school. I absolutely hated it. The only thing I liked then was swimming which my school didn't offer (but I probably would have felt too uncomfortable to do that in front of some of my classmates/teachers anyway).

 

[goldladyslipper]

@1tommytom Same experience here in Britain. Girls did hockey, netball and rounders while the boys did rugby and cricket. Everyone did some general athletics in the summer. Nothing much else, except for that bloody cross country once a year and the dreaded bleep test.

 

[warrior97]

@goldladyslipper Was cross country at your school a really random occurrence and always seemingly on the wettest day of the year? Looking back as an adult I swear it must just have been used when the PE teacher had a hangover and didn't want to be arsed.

 

[feelslikebrick]

@heartofberries Netherlands here. We did always get graded for sports, just like any other subject. We'd have PE for about two hours, twice a week. The first hour was learning gymnastics (handstands, climbing ropes, high jumping, throwing the javelin, etc) .Then the second hour was playing a team sport, football, basketball, hockey, etc. On occasion we'd play those team sports against other schools but not like in a league, it was only four times a year if that. Mind you this was a long long time ago. It was pretty good, and fun.

 

[blt3030]

@feelslikebrick Also from NL. At my school we did a mixture of team sports and stuff more focused on individual fitness, like gymnastics and running. Throughout secondary school it was 2x a week for 2 hours, but in my final year it was once a week. We tended to focus on the same activity for the full two hours though, not half and half.

 

[carla25]

@blt3030 What was the attitude towards doing these sports? In the UK we do PE for 2 hours a week and lots of sports but it definitely felt like only people who were good at PE got any attention, no sense of improving your fitness and as a whole I'd say most people who weren't sporty didn't enjoy PE.

 

[blt3030]

@carla25 Oh that was absolutely the case for me too. I am terrible at all the sports we did at school and thought I was destined to be unfit until I discovered lifting weights in uni.

 

[dminrev]

@heartofberries From Ireland, school experience was twenty years ago at this point. PE in general meant some kind of sport, usually rounders, football (Gaelic or soccer), or some attempt at basketball. There was no training - we were effectively told 'ok now you sport'. We didn't do any exercises for strength and our warm up was a jog around the hall. I think twice in my time in school there was a fitness test held (beep test). Can't say it was in any way effective.

I understand that PE is now becoming a Leaving Cert subject (national second-level exams and college-entry exams) so it's probably being taken more seriously these days.

 

[heartofberries]

@dminrev It's interesting to see what sports people bring up! I had to look up rounders and Gaelic football. I went to one very underfunded school as a kid in the states where we did nothing but play kickball every single day for the whole year.

 

[wallflower1104]

@heartofberries I’m from the US and those tests always sucked because we never learned about technique or trained for any dimension of them. I picked up running as an adult after spending decades thinking I hated it and sucked at it from the mile run test and pacer test.

Turns out practice and building up to a mile/sprinting intervals is better than diving into the deep end on test day. They always just turned us loose with no information about pacing, technique, running form...anything. No wonder I resigned to just walking the mile and flunking out of the pacer test on the third round!

 

[christianaspie11]

@wallflower1104 I had the same experience--was convinced I hated running and was naturally no good at it because of how horrible the mile run and sprints were in gym class as a kid. I distinctly remember one sprint test we did in middle school: I ran as hard as I knew how and the gym teacher loudly reminded everyone that we should be sprinting, not jogging. I nearly died of embarrassment.

I didn't realize I could enjoy running until I hit my 30's. The current way of doing things only teaches kids to hate the activities they test on.

 

[fgarridogalvan]

@wallflower1104 Thank you for mentioning this! In middle school I was always the least fit kid in gym class. The anxiety of the mile run test was awful. I'd try to start strong before quickly struggling to breathe and getting way behind. One year my mom gave me a dr note saying I had mild asthma so I wouldn't have to do it again lol. As an adult I never looked back on those instances and thought...why didn't they train us first?! Now I feel better.

#teamsitandreach