Appalled by young people’s fitness

Small kids play a baseball season in the fall and spring. The fall season is a little shorter.

You’re lucky. I had to go to school for 8 hours a day for most of the year from the time I was 4-17. Most kids don’t have an upbringing like you describe.

And that is what is missing I think in most kid’s physical development. A lot of those basic human movement patterns that I mentioned earlier were practiced incidentally through thousands of hours of outside play. And that is lacking.

I went to school the normal amount of time and managed to spend a huge amount of time outside playing.

This reminds me of Gjert's interview with Citius Mag.

They asked him whether it's possible to reach Jakob's level unless they had started training like he did at the same age. His answer was that it doesn't matter what they were doing at that age as long as they were doing something. Running, cycling, football, whatever, something other than sitting stationary in front of a screen.

That's why it sucks that 8/10 parents consider smartphones and TVs as the best babysitters. Some even think their children become 'good at computers' from all this screen time, but the truth is they barely understand simple data structures like files and directories at age 15.

Though unrelated to physical fitness, it is interesting that I notice young people are up on the latest meme, the latest video, can download and listen to music, but do not really know how to run their computer. They have trouble attaching files or doing other basic things.

To me the real issue is that children nowadays live in an environment hostile to them being outside. You hear stories about CPS getting called because kids are playing outside without an adult around. Or look at how many places have laws against groups of children loitering because they think every youngster is part of a gang.

Even if you take that out of the equation, the physical design of the US makes it unsafe for children to go anywhere on their own because they can't drive. 5+ lane stroads make it impossible to actually get anywhere as a pedestrian. Even if you wait at the crosswalk there's a good chance someone either ignores the signal or blocks the crosswalk with their vehicle. Just crossing the street in a neighborhood isn't even completely safe because people roll through stop signs more often than not. Heck, when's the last time everyone has actually followed the speed limit in a school zone?

I did too, I was just commenting on the other poster who said he spent his “entire” childhood outside. Imagine how much more physically active he was than us both because he didn’t have to be behind a desk for 30 hours a week.

A short while ago I stepped into a 6th grade basketball league coaching situation when the coach became ill.

I was significantly concerned about the fitness of the players. I am not a decent basketball guy by any means, but my father in addition to coaching state track and XC champions in Illinois coached basketball early on at Proviso East, a powerhouse high school program even in the 60's. So I knew something about hoops, including the basics of man to man defense, which is far better from a fundamentals perspective than zone. Young guys don't play well in a Boeheim or John Chaney match-up zone without mastering man to man first. In any event, there was no way for these kids to play man to man - even playing down to the end of the bench, they would be exhausted in two minutes. The coach who became ill warned me.

So we played a lazy zone. It worked out for us except for some parents screaming about playing man defense. I didn't respond - there was no way to play man and if we did every game would have been a 40 point blowout. I was positive and encouraging with the kids - it was 6th grade - and some parents thought I should have yelled at them. Made no sense to me.

I recognize this is anecdotal but not at all like my junior high basketball days - we played man and put on a full court press quite often. We won games because we were in shape. In my day, the Presidential fitness award was highly valued. I worked hard to make sure I made it.

Husky kids need their activities to be year round now too, not just athletes. I mean, those outfield daises ain't gonna pick themselves!

Yes. Older kids do too. I've managed teams in the fall many times but it's always been in an essentially "for profit" league run by a place with batting cages, personal coaching, etc., not by a Little League, town league, or the sorts of entities that put on spring and summer leagues. And it was unusual. Very few of the kids who played in our town leagues were into baseball enough to play in fall teams. I'd say fewer than five per cent of them did. Our season went from Labor Day until the third week of October with the last week available for make up games. But again, it was unusual in the context of when organized kids' leagues normally play which is why I asked. To your original post, I never was appalled by the lack of fitness on the kids' part with one very noticeable exception. Many of the kids in my teams ended up on the cross country and track teams when they got to high school.

Depends upon where you are located. I live in a town that won the International Little League title within the last 20 years and I have driven past the field in February and the place is crawling with players. Not just practicing but playing games. They have multiple fields and sometimes a game is going occurring on one field while another team is practicing on another field. I don't think it is officially "Little League" but they are the same kids who will be playing Little League when summer comes. The warm climate allows them to play year-round and some of them do.

Yes, I do know it happens. I've gone by baseball fields in Arizona and Florida in February too and seen kids' games going on. But that's unusual in the larger world of kids' baseball which is what prompted my original question.

well with coaches like you who put the kids on the spot to get fit you get the results you observed. A good yelling at has never hurt anyone. Instead its all pudding and being nice which results in fat

Was your team getting blown out by other 6th graders? Sounds like this is not really evidence that the generation as a whole is lazy and lacking fitness, just that you weren’t able to get your kids ready to play.

Excellent points thank you. Had not thought of having difficulty getting around.