Appalled by young people’s fitness

It's time to eat that generations lunch. It's ours for the taking late 90's kids!!!!

In addition to what a lot of posters have said if the do get outside they may very well be on an electric scooter or bike. Adults in my neighborhood have riding mowers when their yards could be done with a walk behind, even self propelled. Too many do all they can to avoid physical activity.

And yet most of them will be obese, have diabetes and can't pay the rent.

Wealthiest and most powerful country in the world means nothing to the average Joe Sixpack.

Very interesting. How did they respond to shuttle runs, things like that? Did you see improvement throughout the season in their conditioning?

I literally never see kids outside playing anymore. It's weird but the neighborhood that I grew up in quite a few minor league hockey players to one NHL player grew up in it and it was road hockey from fall until spring and then it was baseball at the park or football or street football.

But this was in the 70's and 80's and video game systems were primitive and expensive and the internet was in it's infancy with bulletin board systems.

I think things will only get worse as parents are now people that grew up with video game systems and the internet being part of their lives from an early stage of their lives.

Fat children are now 35 percent of children and in my era it was 5 percent or so.

I see kids outside all day.

my kids roam the street with other neighbors kids (daughter is 6).

There's actually too many kids sometimes.

Halloween is absolute chaos..candy gone in like 20 mins.

Sports are a big deal and I'm shocked how athletic these kids are(srs).

Right now my neighbor across street the kids are outside practicing lacrosse

Not seeing any of us this OP where i live.

Your question was valid. Little League does NOT play in the Fall. He said it was Little League.

I can’t argue with you. I don’t have an answer, only theories. It is a strange dichotomy. The sport I coach (not baseball) has progressed so much in the past 25 years, I can hardly believe it. Yet we are surrounded by a population that grows increasingly obese, unfit, and immobile. My only theory is that athletes are specializing earlier and earlier, and getting involved so young that they make the neuromuscular adaptations necessary to achieve elite status in that sport. But that doesn’t necessarily make them good all-around athletes. It might make them more fragile. I remember reading about concerns among NBA teams that their rookies were more fragile, and injury prone, and they had ever been.

All I can say is that I took my son to baseball practice this week.

It all starts with weaponization of the food supply. The Food Pyramid is a perfect symbol of a poisoned spear tip aimed at the very heart of western societies.

This. This thread is fake news. The Little League World Series just happened. The Little League World Series, unsurprisingly, marks the end of the Little League season

I don't think you're wrong, but I think the community you're describing really isn't ubiquitous at a national level. It takes a certain level of affluence for families to pay for tennis lessons, club/select soccer leagues, travel to LL tournaments, etc. Even living near a park with multiple fields in good enough condition to host the variety of sports you describe indicates a fairly well-off area. When talking about communities of mostly college-educated, top ~33% of income households where "intensive parenting" is the norm, yes, youth sports are ridiculously competitive.

However, it seems that kids from the bottom half or so of families by income are not getting as much physical activity as prior generations. Especially if they have a single parent who can't afford the time or money to take them to a park or enroll them in organized sports, they're probably a lot more likely to be babysat by a screen than in past generations. There's plenty of talk of inequality of income, wealth, and education in the US, but I think inequality of fitness and access to green spaces or recreational opportunities applies as well.

Thank you. If the OP hadn't specifically said "Little League" I wouldn't have asked.

This is the correct answer. People say this every year. Everyone thought TVs in homes were going to be the end of humanity in the 1950s.

In the last 2-3 years we’ve seen 15 year olds running 45s for 400 and 4:01 for 1 mile. Sub 4 miles happen with regularity now. There will always be extremely lazy kids and extremely athletic kids.

I think it just might be.

As I discussed in an earlier post, the rapid progression of some sports does not mean the wider population is also in better shape.

I'm sure there are plenty of easy examples of young people being sedentary/out of shape, which is definitely concerning. But I think you could probably find the same problems among people of any other age group.

Another L for you in the humor department, Rick. Why do you keep doing this to yourself? It’s really amazing having witnessed this for so long now…

Isn't having stiff soft tissue a good thing for sprinting?