Exercise: Extra Gym Time May Not Help Students
By ERIC NAGOURNEY
More gym in school must mean more exercise time, right?
Not necessarily.
As state legislatures, worried about the increasing obesity problem, consider bills to require more physical education classes, a new study says that more gym time may not make students any fitter. The report appears in the fall issue of the journal Education Next.
“We’re not saying P.E. is hopeless,” said the lead author of the study, John Cawley, an economist at Cornell. The problem, Professor Cawley says, is that a lot of time in gym classes is spent on activities that are not especially vigorous.
The study found that in the last year, 44 states considered measures to increase gym requirements. Several proposals under consideration would require half an hour of gym a day.
“The solution,” the authors wrote, “seems straightforward.”
But the study cited earlier research indicating that gym classes often fail to meet state requirements, and it quoted a government report that said physical education too often means “roll out the balls and let them play.”
Their own research, the authors said, found that when states required more gym, girls reported spending slightly more time in vigorous exercise. But they also report less physical activity outside of gym class.
The findings were based on a review of state physical education requirements and a federal health survey of high school students. In that survey, the teenagers were asked a range of questions about their fitness, including how active they were each week and how much they weighed. The students were also asked how often they had gym and how much time they spent exercising there.
When the researchers compared the information, they found little evidence to prove that more gym resulted in more fitness.
“The results of our study suggest that the effect of increased state P.E. requirements is mixed at best,” they wrote.
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