Appalled by young people’s fitness

I never want to be the older guy bitching about "kids these days" and how my generation grew up the right way etc. I grew up in the 90s and definitely played video games with friends over the years, but we also played pick-up ball and went outside.

But the e-bike thing is really doing my head in. My neighborhood is absolutely filled with dips*** teenagers riding e-bikes in groups. To the point where I"m shocked when I see a kid riding a real bike. Such an easy way to get some basic fitness and they are more interested in getting the same expensive e-bike as all their buddies. Add in the fact that they drive them like dumbasses and clip pedestrians on the sidewalk and it's winding me up. Glad I'm not a parent, because I would have to be the mean dad who doesn't buy one for junior.

A recent CNBC article on army recruiting.

“Only about 23% of kids between 16 and 21 are able to meet our standards, and some of that, frankly, is reflective of the problem that we have in our country with obesity,” she said, adding that behavioral health and misconduct are also factor."

Well good news dude their parents signed them up for little league so they're gonna get exercise now. Sorry your kid won't make it to natties.

I had a childhood like that growing up around a bunch of lake communities. It was really fun.

I can't really begrudge the kids for being different thought. The town I grew up in added new lanes of traffic and a number of warehouses got built in the area. Biking to the other lakes to see who was free was easy as a kid. Doing that now means navigating around 18 wheelers. I probably wouldn't play outside nearly as much if I was a kid now. A lot of stuff we build for whatever reason (adult convenience, money, etc) makes being outside suck.

23% geez…I wonder what the numbers were, say 40 years ago, before widespread home video games.

Coach concerned - practice was once a week so improvements in fitness were marginal. Plus I came in late in the season and it wasn't realistic to build fitness at that point. My surprise was that even the kids with some athletic talent just were not fit. We played such a lazy zone when a good three point gunner was on the other team it gave us fits.

Again, all anecdotal. Back in my middle school days, our tall guy became a NHL defenseman. A great hockey player but a good hoops teammate. For some reason our school system never really was good in basketball. But with our hockey guy - all muscle in the 7th grade, we could full court press because he got back on defense really quickly and constantly ran to defend. We ended up having three sub 4:10 high school milers from that middle school team, so maybe my perceptions are skewed.

My mother was a top flight college field hockey player and golfer and was in shape despite a stocky build. She could beat me and the boys in the neighborhood in 50 yard sprints until 5th grade. Being out of fitness when you were young was not a common thing. My mother made sure we were outside and active virtually all day.

Thank you very much for sharing your experience.

Mate, you're their older brother. You're meant to prevent this from happening, not bash them on the internet.

I hear you, but as someone who has made peace with automatic transmission on cars and recently warily purchased a road bike with electronic shifting and loving it, I imagine e-bikes for commuting would be easy to like as well.

Come on, older folks aren’t doing much better. Younger folks always do better than their parents and that evolution is not changing anytime soon except by way of a catastrophic event like a meteor strike or nuclear annihilation of civilization.

Programs of this magnitude were not the absolute norm. These programs at these specific frames of time were also designed to get young men fit to fight in the Vietnam war.

That said, the state of general fitness among many in the US is just sad.

A Simple Thing To Encourage Fitness would be to do what they always did until 5 or 10 years ago and leave all Outdoor Tracks and other things usually found on school grounds like Pull Up Bars, open for Public Use.

Also Schools and Work Places could have regular Fitness Tests with dofferent Standards for People based on age and Sex example, for age 20-29 Male how many can do 25 pullups and at a Workplace give a Small Reward for anyone who does 25 pullups say $1 if They can do oner 25 or a Quarter per hour less if one can not do 10 Pullups, Similar with running or whatever, Same With Schools This would Encourage Good Health, Fitness and reasonable Diet and all the Benefits that come with it, In school it will even help Grades

I think a lot of the difficulty some young men are having in getting attention from the opposite sex, is the end result of spending their youth and puberty sedentary.

If you're an overweight, sedentary young man, you're going to go through your developmental years with lower levels of growth hormone and testosterone. That's not conducive to developing the broad, lean look of a young man. Plus your skin, hair etc isn't going to resemble that of a healthy young man, simply because you're not healthy.

For women, the impact is likely less severe, due to the nature of female sex hormones and body fat deposits.

How long have you been observing 7-9 year old athletes to be able to compare this generation to previous generations? We probably looked pretty bad trying to play baseball at that age even though we thought we looked like mini professionals. And do you see this across other sports as well? It is possible that the growth of soccer and decline of baseball in overall popularity means that fall baseball is not attracting the best athletes.

Appalled at old people’s fitness. Have you seen the old geasers in the US? Compared to other countries, our old people are fat, have no mobility, strength or can do basic movement patterns.

i blame them pretty much 100%

Maybe this is true, it may have also be true about your generation relative to your fathers'.

Discus would be good exercise.

went to the park to walk the dog yesterday and sure, there were a group of 6 or 7 kids outside at the park but every single one of them had their heads buried into their phones surrounding a bench. Sure their parents probably thought they were outside "playing." It was actually disturbing to watch because I am a new dad and wonder what it will be like raising a kid with social media and smart phones.