by Sally Treadwell

What those students really did was laugh a lot, like they were little kids rolling down a grassy hill on a summer’s day. And that’s what exercise should be. Something exhilarating and joyful.

Sometimes I watch this really scary British TV show called ‘You Are What You Eat.’ It features a terrier-like woman who nips at people’s heels until they take a good hard look at themselves, quit eating rubbish, and get moving.

But here’s the thing. I’ve noticed that when these families start out on their 8-week program, they’re not just overweight, they’re…dull. No zip, no zest.

And after Scary Lady is done bullying them onto bikes, soccer pitches, trampolines, and hiking trails, it’s not their often astonishing weight loss that propels me straight out of the door to pursue my kids with squirt guns. It’s the sheer sparkle that has transformed them into vibrant, engaged human beings who seem to be having a heck of a good time.

Fitness isn’t about weight. Sure, people who literally take life in stride are far more likely to stay at a good weight, but skinny people are often unfit—in fact, a recent study showed that 24 percent of thin adults have at least two cardiovascular risk indicators like high blood pressure, triglycerides or blood sugar that could be dramatically improved by a regular exercise program. Conversely, about half the overweight group and a full third of the obese group were revealed to be metabolically fit. And on an anecdotal level, the chubby among us are often to be seen zooming down trails at a pretty good clip.

In other words, whether you’re Heidi Klum or Queen Latifah, you’d better sweat a little every day.

But frankly, we know all that. We also know that childhood obesity is rising rapidly and will lead to—yada, yada. What we may not be so clear about are the mental benefits of both casual and organized sports. In other words, the sparkle.

Exercise makes you smarter.
Well, not exactly. But what exercise does do is to rev up your brain so that it’s ready for learning. Check out Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain by Harvard psychiatrist Dr. John Ratey.

According to Ratey, “Exercise stimulates our gray matter to produce Miracle-Gro for the brain.” When we exercise, he explains, we send chemicals, including a protein called IGF-1, into our bloodstream. Once the IGF-1 gets into the brain, it orders up more BDNF, a.k.a. brain-derived neurotropic factor, which helps the brain to grow the synapses that are essential to forming the connections the brain must make if it’s going to learn. It strengthens the cells and prevents cell death, too. Levels of dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine also increase after a good workout, helping both kids and adults to both focus and calm down—much like a Prozac/Ritalin cocktail, says Ratey, only without the ugly side effects.

Wow. That’s a lot of scientific verbiage, but what does it all actually amount to?

Well, for a 21-school system with 18,500 students in Naperville, IL, it translated to a number 1 world ranking for science achievement, plus a number 6 ranking for math. Contrast and compare THAT with the average US ranking of 18th in science and 19th in math.

More/better studying, you ask? Nope. New rules. The kids were simply required to participate in Zero Hour, exercising to the point of keeping their heart rate at 160 to 180 beats per minute for ten minutes right before class.

And Naperville’s startling achievement wasn’t a fluke. Inspired by that program, staff at a 550-student junior high school in Titusville, Pennsylvania restructured the school day to include time for exercise. They cut a few minutes from each class and added ten minutes to the day. School test scores went from below the state average, to 18 percent above it in reading and 17 percent above it in math. Bonus: there hasn’t been a single fistfight since the program began in 2000.

In Augusta, GA, a 14-week trial of different levels of exercise found that the children who spent the most time—40 minutes a school day—playing tag and other active games also made the greatest strides in both standardized academic testing and, furthermore, a test that measured their level of ‘executive function’. (That would be thinking processes that involve planning, organizing, abstract thought, and self-control.)

Your takeaway: All this goes to show that schools that cut Phys Ed—and in the US, only some 30 percent of schools require it daily—in pursuit of academic excellence are barking up entirely the wrong tree. So it’s up to parents to a) convince the schools that they’re wrong; b) pick up the slack; c) get some activity into your own brain/body combo.

Death of dodgeball
One of the reasons that the Naperville program worked so well was that the coach was both inspired and inspiring. Realizing that getting picked last for a basketball team, struggling to do a chin-up, getting bruised in dodgeball or standing around waiting to get subbed into a team wasn’t going to do a whole lot for either his students’ health or their desire to be active, he switched tactics. He raised money for a climbing wall, kayaks, and some innovative virtual reality-enhanced exercise bikes that made students feel as if they were skiing or racing. He formed innovative three-on-three basketball teams. He had them chase rubber chickens out on the field, and link hands in a tangle that required cooperation to be untangled. And he taught them square dancing. Yes, seriously. If you’ve ever watched the movie Mad Hot Ballroom you know how well a school dance program can work for enhancing social skills as well coordination and cardiovascular health.

Your takeaway: What those students really did was laugh a lot, like they were little kids rolling down a grassy hill on a summer’s day. And that’s what exercise should be. Something exhilarating and joyful.

Ditch the drugs
Oh, the glorious chemical balance achieved by a well-exercised body and replenished cells! When we get the heart pumping, for instance, its muscle secretes atrial natriuretic peptide. That regulates stress and anxiety, according to Ratey, only unlike the happy pills we see advertised, it’s free and the only side-effects are a beach-ready body.

And exercise will also help to keep you and your family free from other modern-day plagues with biochemical roots—depression, ADD, ADHD, anxiety, dementia, stress, insomnia, and so on. Physical plagues like heart disease and diabetes can usually be warded off with exercise, too.

Is it a cure-all? No. And some people really do need medications. But Big Pharma’s dirty little secret is that many prescriptions wouldn’t be necessary if people ate well and exercised vigorously, and an even dirtier secret is that one medication very often leads to another as the delicate chemical balance of the body is thrown off.

Many studies show that active kids might well also avoid that other modern-day plague, illegal drugs. One of the most vividly healthy and adventurous people I know—he builds ropes courses, climbing walls, and rainforest canopy walkways, and often drags his kids along to Amazon jungles—shrugs off the specter. “I tell my kids, hey, I understand if you want to get high, but there are just much, much better ways of doing it.”

Lifetime sports are fabulous…
Why do high school football jocks tend to go to seed? Because it’s the only form of sport they ever really learned, and it’s unlikely (though far from impossible) that a child will continue playing football on a regular basis in his adult life. While team sports have multiple advantages, don’t forget to make equal and enthusiastic time for a variety of lifelong sports like hiking, tennis, swimming, running, and biking.

…but team sports are also fabulous
The places you’ll go (both literally and metaphorically) with a team! Team sports teach fair play plus social skills, co-operation, commitment, and respect—and how to work as part of a team, of course.

In recent years there’s been a lamentable move towards believing that competition is somehow bad. A really good coach will bring out the very best side of competitiveness, showing kids how to strive to excel and lift up their entire team. That’s a far cry from lazy Reality TV-style competition, where people just try to undermine each other.

Team sports also teach the old-fashioned virtue of Character. Learning to win gracefully, to lose just as gracefully, to struggle against the odds, to overcome adversity, to work towards a common goal—that’s character.

Sports and self-esteem
Oh, brother. I just hate that phrase self-esteem. It’s become shorthand for “praise the kids lavishly for anything they do so they never have to feel insecure about their accomplishments.”

Ugh.

Self-esteem doesn’t come from indiscriminate praise. Self-esteem comes from being genuinely competent, from meeting challenges, from knowing that you have done your absolute best and really accomplished something. From practicing and mastering new skills. And yes, wise coaches and parents use sports of all kinds to help them to achieve all that.

Balancing rough stuff
Football players are 40 percent, and wrestlers 45 percent, more likely to be involved in an altercation, while tennis players are 35 percent less inclined to be confrontational. According to study author Derek Kreager, that’s because football and wrestling involve physical domination. (He doesn’t comment on John McEnroe.) But that doesn’t mean you should insist on a switch for your kids; football and wrestling are both valuable sports. Just bring balance with perhaps a martial art that insists on discipline or a purely intellectual ‘sport’ like chess; enforce good sportsmanship rules diligently.

Tweak and Twitter
One Halloween we were in a little town that pried kids and parents away from the bonfire and annual candy-guzzle by organizing a flashlight treasure hunt in the woods around a little lake. What a blast that was! We ended the night on a well-toned high, instead of lapsing into a diabetic coma.

And lately I’ve seen tech-savvy kids using Twitter on their cell phones to play impromptu games of an orienteering/sardines/flashlight tag/treasure hunt/pounce hybrid. Twitter’s infamous “What are you doing?” is actually meaningful when it involves clues rather than the boring recitation of someone’s chores. So how can YOU unshackle your family from the conventional?

What good parents know—and teach
Really good parents know that they have to teach their kids that there’s the easy way to do things and then there’s the hard, inefficient route.

You can show children how to spend life sitting around, perpetually chilly, in some weird Jedi-style ‘wearable blanket’ and popping statins and blood pressure meds because your blood is flowing sluggishly in hardened arteries. Or you can keep all your synapses firing for a lifetime while honestly having a ball. In a nutshell, by living joyously.

You know, the only regret those families on ‘You Are What You Eat’ ever express is that they’d wasted so much of their lives in front of the TV instead of pogo-sticking, or belly-dancing, or racing the dog around the woods.

So what’s your family going to do to live well this summer?