CatholicFIT Coach | Module 4/5
What is a Coach?
(Module 1/5)
What does it mean to be a coach? How do we facilitate growth and lead by example? We discuss our role as a coach and disciple, while setting goals in our Goal Setting Workshop.
Understanding Identity.
(Module 2/5)
Why is developing a unique and personal faith and fitness identity so important? What questions can we ask to help our students develop this identity?
What is Health?
(Module 3/5)
How can we teach a tangible, workable definition of spiritual and physical health? CatholicFIT health units and more are in development. Click here for more.
What is Fitness?
(Module 4/5)
What are the fitness skills we use every day? How do we define fitness, and ensure we are using our fitness for good? What connects our faith to our fitness?
Pillars & Principles
(Module 5/5)
There are 3 foundational pillars and 7 principles that comprise the CatholicFIT curriculum. Learn about these and more as we prepare to begin the 8 week program.
Defining Fitness & the History of P.E. (Module 4 of 5)
Ask your students what fitness means. Ask them what words or phrases they think of when they hear the word “fitness.” This may facilitate useful discussion with your students that allows you to get to know them better, and may give you insight as to where they are getting their health and fitness information. Is mom on Weight Watchers? If so, maybe fitness means Weight Watchers to that student. These simple but powerful questions also establish a baseline for what they have learned to date. I have asked these questions for several years and have heard the following answers:
Regardless of how “right” or “wrong” these answers may seem, it is important to start here. As with identity, each student will develop his or her own unique and personal definition of fitness. As teachers and coaches, we can guide them with healthy, empowering ideas that are universal in context, knowing that will also embrace concepts unique to their personalities, environment, and values. As with most things, fitness and its associated behaviors and lifestyle can mean many different things depending on culture, income, family life, education, and personality type.
Let’s start with a generally acceptable model and definition.
If health is the ability to heal, fitness is the ability to adapt. On a walk you encounter a large hill, can you adapt to this physical challenge? An aging parent cannot get out of a recliner, can you give him or her a hand? Pulling a heavy mall door open, asking your students to run a mile, performing a pull up hang for 20 seconds – these all require physical adaptation.
Maybe a simpler way to understand fitness is the ability to perform a task. One way to set a specific fitness goal is to ask what task you hope to perform – play soccer, cut the grass weekly, do ten push ups, pick up your (grand-)child? This helps us teach an accessible idea of fitness, but also helps people relate this often abstract idea to a concrete task or goal.
As we did with the word health, we can also use internationally renowned physical therapist and author Gray Cook’s definition of fitness:
Developing Fitness. We are always and have always been adapting and performing daily tasks for many reasons:
- play – playing a sport, running around on the playground, hiking, sight-seeing on vacation,
- function – starting a lawn mower, picking up a child, getting on the floor to look under a bed or couch, moving a couch, standing up from a chair,
- survival – hunting and gathering food, running from a mean animal, swimming back to shore.
In doing these things, we use and continually develop fitness two ways:
- manipulate or choose different environments to adapt to – walking outside barefoot, training in higher elevation as Olympians do, taking the stairs instead of the elevator, and
- perform different tasks – play soccer, pick up heavy objects, play on the floor with a child, exercise in a weight room, hop on one foot.
If we challenge our bodies to adapt over and over again, and we are mindful of our recovery practices (i.e. water and sleep) we can become fit.
Move Well. Move Often. The Prerequisite to Fitness Development. Adaptation is what we do to become fit. If we can move through a fundamental set of patterns, we can begin to learn from the environment.
Just as we cannot learn from a book until we are able to read, we cannot efficiently and effectively learn from games, sports, or complex exercise routines until we learn to move well. Put an illiterate person in a library for 30 days and see how much they learn. We want to continually build our students’ movement literacy as we progress them through more difficult games and activities.
We want to teach and develop fitness through movement exploration, practicing a fundamental set of movements, and then using those patterns in more complex fitness and athletic endeavors. This is the basis of the CatholicFIT exercises.
Here is a quick list of exercises with examples of each. You will be provided with all weekly exercises accompanied by two videos weekly. Remember, these are baseline movement patterns, and a thousand variations and modifications exist for each to explore. Each exercise or movement pattern was chosen because of its use as an assessment tool and mode of developing fitness skills like strength, speed, coordination, balance, and power.
Personal Reflection & Story. This leads us to our own personal questions and reflection about our fitness. These are important to answer for you so you can help your students come up with ideas throughout the program:
What does fitness mean to you?
Consider any words, phrases, and behaviors that come to mind. They can be positive or negative. Does fitness mean getting up an hour early to train? Does being fit mean being strong? Being a good runner? Does fitness stress you out because you have a difficult time finding time to exercise. Be ready for this discussion with your students.
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Why do you choose to be fit?
This question is different …. if the last question asked WHAT fitness is to you, this is asking WHY you (or you would) choose to value fitness. If you get up extra early to exercise, why? If you eat a healthy breakfast every morning, why? Is it to experience pleasure? To avoid pain? Think about the pros and cons of choosing to be healthy.
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History of Physical Education
I recently revisited the history of P.E. from a religious perspective. During the Reformation, the Church felt physical activity was frivolous unless it served God and a practical purpose in everyday life. American settlers then brought this idea with them, claiming that recreation was valuable if it helped renew one’s mind, body, and soul.
I dig that … and while it was mostly the protestants who were using this approach, this is what we hope to share today in our Catholic schools. I am saving more history of P.E. for another post, but here is an interesting video describing a PE curriculum from 1961. I think we can all learn from this and other videos from our history.
Bonus Video: Movement Education in Physical Education circa 1961. I discovered this and many other videos I have been watching lately on the origins and philosophy of physical education. Watch the video, or at least read over the highlights, quotes, and themes I note here:
- Movement is the language of action.
- Children need little encouragement to move, but still need guidance to learn good movement. (Unfortunately this is not the case in 2018, as increasingly more children need both.)
- The beginning of class is a great time for movement practice.
- Because movement is so natural for children, teachers often overlook the importance of teaching a sound basis for more efficient and expressive movement patterns.
Finally, the video discuses what they called the 3 awareness’s:
- Self in Physical Environment – a spatial awareness compared to other students and objects
- Body and Its Capabilities – students explore their abilities to hop, run, tumble, twist and more
- Movement Components – speed, space, force, control