Project Valkyrie: WiiLog

[truepenny]

Another half hour with my perky little Big Brother.

---

I am, for my sins, a child of the eighties, which means that my experience of physical education was shaped, or warped, by the Presidential Fitness Awards. And here's the thing. I remember, all too well, how they explained to us that girls have poor upper body strength, but what nobody ever said was: You can do something about that if you want to. Maybe they thought it didn't need to be said, but with a president who wanted to convince us that ketchup was a vegetable, I personally think nobody should have been leaving that stuff to chance.

Because seriously. No, my upper body will probably never be as strong as my husband's--unless I go crazy and give up this writing gig to become a bodybuilder, which . . . no. But that doesn't mean I have to be weak. Just because I can't do as many push-ups as he can doesn't mean I can't do push-ups.

The Presidential Fitness Awards, in retrospect, were all about telling us how we didn't measure up to the arbitrary standard imposed by somebody in authority. (Who was it? I don't even know.) And I think it would have been better, both more empowering and more conducive to instilling good habits of exercise, to say, okay, here's where you are. Here's what you can do to become stronger and faster. It's just looking at things the other way round, but it feels different. Doesn't it?

Of course, it would also have required gym teachers to, you know, teach, which considering the number of years in a row I was forced to play flag football without anyone ever once explaining how the goddamn game was played . . .

*ahem* Yeah, I might still be bitter about that.

Comments

[oddmonster.livejournal.com]

I have to say, it wasn't any better if you could do the damn pull-ups.

I could do more pull-ups than all the boys in the class, so the teacher--yes the teacher--called me a dyke.

Fourth grade.

Ah, Republicans.

ETA: I can now do even more pull-ups. Mr Polaski, you can suck my dick.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

::facepalm:: There is a special hell for teachers like that one. Or perhaps I mean "teachers."

Girls at my school weren't allowed even to try to do pull-ups. We had to do the flexed arm hang, which I think they must have borrowed from the Spanish Inquisition.

[oddmonster.livejournal.com]

I know! That's the interesting thing: the girls shunned me for choosing pullups over the arm-hang, but the teacher shunned me for actually pulling it off. Oh grade school, is there anything you didn't destroy?

(grad school destroyed other things. But I digress.)

[callunav.livejournal.com]

I was in high school. I couldn't do pull-ups, but I could stay in a bent-arm hang for pretty much as long as I wanted: the teacher got damned frustrated with me and the other girl who just kept on hanging there, long after all the others had gone off. Also, I liked sit-ups, which apparently wasn't part of the plan.

And what I couldn't do well, I refused to do at all. I walked the 5K 'run.' Sometimes I feel sorry for my teachers....but when it comes to the presidential fitness tests, not so much.

Walking the Run

[themadblonde]

You too??? I hated my sadistic gym teacher & he pretty much gave up early on trying to motivate anyone who didn't fall in panting. I thought most sports were dumb, had no interest in physical competition, & nobody ever bothered to try to explain to me WHY these things could be important, just that it was what we were SUPPOSED to do. As I was never particularly good @ making someone else's priorities mine unless I had a good reason to do so, I, mostly, couldn't be bothered to conform.

[razziecat.livejournal.com]

They told us that stuff about upper body strength so we wouldn't get any ideas about wanting to do things that only boys were allowed to do, like play football. I went to grade school in the 60's, gym was mandatory and I hated the ever-living F--K out of it. To this day the words "dodge ball" make me gag. I tell people that playing volleyball is against my religion. Republicans are still using that upper-body strength argument to try to keep women out of battle, although how much that particular physical attribute matters in the modern army, when pecs the size of Kansas ain't going to save you from an IED, I couldn't say.

[eiriene.livejournal.com]

The whole presidential fitness test was bullshit. I failed the flexibility tests every year of my life, yet my physical therapist says I'm hypermobile in both my ankles and my hips... yet they don't measure for that.

On the flag football stuff, we actually had to take tests on the rules of volleyball and flag football, etc. Written tests. Strange gym classes in NJ. =)

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

Holy crap, maybe it's a statewide New Jersey gym teacher delusion! I too had to take written tests on rules for the random games we played--instead of us going outside to play the games.

While my gym teacher had taught at my middle school for literally 40 years (she remembered teaching some kids' grandparents), I will say this for her: she always encouraged us girls to try our best on the pull-ups, and only then go for the arm-hanging (WTF is the point of that anyway, incidentally). I was stupidly happy the one year I made National in everything. Of course, one year two people did the mile in Presidential time by walking, so I don't know what the point of it all really was.

Chalk up another victory for the Gipper, right up there with firing all the air traffic controllers and killing independent bookstores through inventory taxes.

[aedifica]

I had happily forgotten those tests. Ugh. My strongest memory of them is that every year I had to give myself pains in the legs by trying to reach the bar on the little wooden box, the bar that meant I could touch my toes. I never could, and I hurt myself trying every year. (I'm quite flexible in other directions, but I have never in my life touched my toes without bending my knees.)

[torrilin.livejournal.com]

Running a mile. On knees, ankles and hips where I would develop arthritis... BY AGE SIXTEEN.

I'm ok, with not having the same upper body strength as my partner. I'm ok with the stupid stretching test showing I was inflexible. I'm ok with never doing a pull-up. I'm not ok with being shamed every freaking year for being slow when the damn test was actively contributing to my lifetime joint damage, and is partly responsible for my current level of disability.

On a bicycle? I am fast. Measure stuff without damaging me people!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I had the identical flag football experience. I blamed mine on being in Nebraska.

Also, if you did well on the Presidential Physical Fitness whatsits and then couldn't play the games because nobody had taught you and you hadn't sought them out on your own, having better things to do, people tended to yell a lot. I hate people yelling.

[cabell.livejournal.com]

OH MY GOD. That whole "here, play this game that no one ever told you the rules for" thing drove me INSANE.

Also, I wrote a report in grade school about the day I was born--Reagan declared ketchup a vegetable for school lunches on that very day, November 6, 1981. :p

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

We never had to play flag football in gym. On the other hand, that just meant I had no idea how it worked when we had to play it in camp. (I still have no idea how to play it, which has been a distinct disadvantage in reading the Percy Jackson books.)

And now I live in a place where having muscles is acutely unfashionable even for guys. Which is just too damned bad because I intend to go on building mine even if it makes me a freak who has to import my clothing from abroad.

(There was a recent issue here where an elite athlete left Taiwan because the government wasn't supporting him sufficiently. He accepted Singapore citizenship, because that government made him an offer he couldn't refuse. His sport: pool. No, not swimming, I mean pool on a pool table with balls and cues. Apparently he couldn't practice enough while attending college, which was funny for me because I always thought people went to college to learn pool, not to mention table tennis and hacky sack.)

[jade-sabre-301.livejournal.com]

Presidential Fitness Awards are shared by children of the nineties too. I'm just going to pray for the best and think hey, maybe they're gone by now.

Oh God, gym class...when every other girl in the gym could play volleyball but me, I officially gave up.

[callunav.livejournal.com]

This is my ironic face.

I'm pretty sure the fitness tests are gone, because I'm working in a public grade school now, and...most of the kids don't get gym/PE at all. There really isn't such a thing. They get about 15 minutes of recess right before or right after lunch, and a couple times a week there's supposed to be a "movement" class, but it can get canceled for anything, as far as I can tell.

I wanted the fitness tests gone, but...not this way.

[ckd]

One of the best side-effects of the way I went through high school[1] was that I managed to get out of almost all of the PE requirement. I still had to take a semester of state history, because that one was a legal requirement they couldn't waive.

[1] Short version: "expeditiously". Longer version: ask me sometime in a better venue.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

State history? I'm betting you were in Texas.

[ckd]

Washington state, actually. I'm not surprised Texas had a requirement, though.

[allichaton.livejournal.com]

Oh lord, I was just complaining to someone about flag football the other day. "And they just threw us on the field! I don't watch football! I didn't know what the hell I was supposed to be doing!"

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I recommend The Frailty Myth for a lot of history and research about women, strength, and sports, even though the author mistakenly assumes that everyone really wants to be athletic.

As for me and Kennedy's fitness tests, I don't seem to have been put through the whole series-- I don't remember flexibility tests. I do remember the walk-run, and being horrendous at it. When Kennedy was killed, I was pleased-- he'd made my life a little worse for no good reason. I'm less callous about such things now, but I can't say I was entirely wrong back then.

[nathreee.livejournal.com]

I'm not from the US, so I don't know what flag football is either. But in Europe our gym teachers used to spend a fair amount of time on real gymnastics, including handstands and saltos. And since I could never get my feet above my head without falling over, I hated that. I got into an argument with the teacher, where he explained that doing handstands and saltos were an important part of my grade and I yelled at him that after I would graduate, no one would care if I could do a salto or not, neither college teachers nor employers. I got detention for a week, I think, but the gym teacher never tried argue with me again.

[technomom]

Oh, I HATED HATED HATED those damned things!

I was in high school. I was already out on the field with the marching band for at least an hour, usually more, every bloody day (I seriously lost a *dangerous* amount of weight during the two weeks of rookie camp, then regular band camp--for which we did NOT go away and which certainly did not involve any American Pie-type shenanigans). I never did understand why the school (or county, or state, or whoever) wouldn't let the marching band thing count as physical activity!

That was when I learned that I had arthritis, oh joy. There was no sympathy (or accommodation) from the school.

Despite being in the best shape of my life, I hadn't a hope of passing most of those horrible tests. I was shocked to find that I passed the sit-ups with flying colors. The coach was, too--he made me retest, with him as my "partner," to be sure I wasn't cheating. I set new records on the flexibility test (I'm hypermobile everywhere, but didn't know it then). The rest? HA!

Of course, the coaches never coached in any way. They just yelled at and belittled us. They obviously regarded the required PE classes as something that was our fault, something that got in the way of their more important competitive teams and such.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

The way in which the American educational system has been hijacked by competitive team sports is something that makes me so mad I actually can't talk about it. I end up waving my hands around and not finishing any sentences.

So. Mad.

[callunav.livejournal.com]

It just occurred to me and I felt impelled to add that some of the "girls have poor upper body strength" is based on differences in muscle and strength distribution in the body, yes, but some of it is completely specious. I always was given the impression that "girly" pushups - the ones wit your knees on the ground - were an accommodation to girls' puny upper body strength. It wasn't until I was doing martial arts as an adult (where, let me tell you, my upper body strength was not notably lacking, although my ability to do rear kicks really was) that I understood just how much of an impact the lower center of gravity women have has on these things. For good party fun, get a mixed-sex group of people who don't believe this trying the chair test.* Good times.

It was also a lot of fun - though less practical as a party game - to watch relatively proficient and medium-ranked young men in the bloom of their strength try to throw me. I'm not light, but they had thrown men my weight with ease. I helpfully allowed them to arrange my arm over their shoulders and stood still while they got their hips in place, and in the soul of kindness told them they were going to need to get lower, which they invariably ignored. The looks on their faces when they executed the move and I didn't budge was priceless. It wasn't because I was fat. It was because I was female, and if there's one thing I do know how to do it's drop my weight even further down than it normally is.

If you want to push a weight up directly, not using a fulcrum, then you want to get the weight as close as possible to being directly above the push. So in push-ups, the closer the center of gravity is to the shoulders, the more efficiently you can use your arm strength. In most women, the center of gravity is one hell of a lot lower than in most men - i.e., further away from the shoulders.

But I never heard that part when I was in fitness in high school. I just heard how girls couldn't do push-ups, so they could do the easy ones with the knees, if they wanted.

Grrrrrr.



* The chair test:

Place a plain kitchen-type chair against a wall. Stand so that the chair is between you and the wall, bends forward at the waist to something close to a right angle so that your forehead or the crown of your head is braced against the wall, and your arms hang straight down, hands dangling past the seat of the chair. Now, in that position, simply grasp the chair by the edges of the seat and lift it off the ground toward your chest. Watch as men and women alternately attempt this. Laugh.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Is that a big factor pre-puberty, though? (Actually I have no idea *where* a child's center of gravity is. But wherever it is, mine was there until I was at least fourteen, which was ninth grade for me. Probably more like sixteen, at which age I was still in preteen sizes.)

[callunav.livejournal.com]

Hm. I suspect not for true child-bodies, though quite possibly yes for someone like you at age 16.

For me, these tests were a more pressing feature of high school than younger, and not only would it have started being true for me at 12-13, it would have been true of most of the girls in my class by the times I'm remembering.

But did you, in the body-shape you're remembering, feel that you had notably less upper body strength than boys comparable to you in size and athleticism?

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Not at all, as a child. When I was 12-16, any boys comparable to me in size weren't likely to be athletic in the least. I was *tiny*.

[jennygadget.livejournal.com]

I remember them more from upper elementary. But then, I'd hit puberty by that time.

[renatus.livejournal.com]

Hm. What's supposed to happen with the chair test? My husband and I just tried it and neither of us had any difficulty or strangeness, so I'm not sure if we were doing something wrong, or his girlish hips helped him out.

[callunav.livejournal.com]

Hm. Were you really bent at a right-angle? We did this at my dojo, which is the only place I've seen it in action. I think my sensei wanted to make the very strong 19-y.o. male members think. Really standing a torso+head's length away from the wall, bent at a right angle with the crown of the head against the wall, all the women could lift the chair without understanding what the issue was, and none of the men - of widely varying physiques - could. So either it was something about your set-up, or your husband has an extremely unusually low center of gravity for a man, which wouldn't necessarily be about the hips, but might be, I suppose.

[renatus.livejournal.com]

That's what I thought was supposed to happen. I'm fairly sure I got him bent to the proper angle, but I'm not sure. Hmm. I'll try it again when he has one of his male friends over. Thanks. :)

[jennygadget.livejournal.com]

OMG!

I love you. Also, I love physics.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

Indeed. I have an awful lot of upper body strength for a girl. I still can't do an unassisted pullup. But that's why we have the assisted pullup machine.

Pullups are FUN.

[callunav.livejournal.com]

And assisted pullup machines are the best toys EVER. I had a *blast* playing working out on one when I was using the Y.

[rarelylynne.livejournal.com]

I hated those tests with the white-hot passion of a thousand fiery suns.

I was a cheerleader and a dancer all through high school. I couldn't do the flexed-arm hang, but I can throw other people into the air and catch them safely?

Ergo, those tests were CRAP.

We had a written final exam in gym class. *eyeroll* On sports we DIDN'T PLAY.

[elmocho.livejournal.com]

I was the scrawny kid who hated P.E. all through grade school and high school. I don't think I could do a pull-up to save my ass. However, I could usually do just as well on the leg-involved exercise because I had to use my legs all the time like everyone else. It surprised me that I could get "Bodybuilder" on the Wii Fit's lunge routine on the first try, 50 out of 50.

The Wii Fit seems odd for upper-body workout. I've tried the push-up/side plank routine. Most of the other routines allow you to mirror the trainer movements, but that one rests mostly on audio cues, due to the positions you have to take to accomplish them comfortably: It's not easy to do a push-up with your head craned up at the screen. Also "Push up!" is counterintuitive, because the trainer really means "Do the push-up and drop your weight down."

Also, on the push-ups and Downward Facing Dog, my sweaty hands start to slip on the balance board.

[thatratorpheus.livejournal.com]

This youth fitness stuff started under Eisenhower - Kennedy called it The President's Council on Physical Fitness and set up all sorts of guidelines and Johnson started the physical fitness awards and testing at various grade levels. Each president has added his own bells and whistles. I remember running back and forth and back and forth, picking up a blackboard eraser and dropping it, picking it up and dropping it - and weirdly named events like "The 600-yard Run/Walk".

We had this stretching test where we had to sit on the floor, legs forward and slightly apart, and then we'd bend over to see how far we could get our fingertips past our feet. I have short arms relative to my legs and even though I was totally folded in half like a jack knife I was still marked as "needs improvement".

[clhollandwriter]

Wow. I absolutely despised PE as a child, but I'm from the UK and it was nowhere near as bad as people are describing here!

[innerplatypus.livejournal.com]

I remember my PE teachers being pretty good--but the weight room at the high school gym was underground, only accessible by going through the boys change rooms. I hope they demolish this structurally sexist building soon.

[razziecat.livejournal.com]

Y'know, we never did ANYTHING in gym that has given me any lasting benefits! I hated team sports--I was the one picked last for everything, because I was never any good at it. Then there were the teachers who insisted we all do the same stupid things, like cartwheels. I couldn't do a cartwheel to save my life. I sucked at basketball, too. Once, while waiting for class to be dismissed, I dragged a chair over to the basket, got on it and attempted to sink the ball from a distance of maybe 12 inches. I missed, of course.

Couldn't throw a softball worth a damn, nor hit one with a bat. I can catch, as it turns out, quite well. Still. In my 50's. We're talking kitty balls tossed against the wall, though...:)

[renatus.livejournal.com]

Those Presidential fitness tests went a long way toward making sure I hated exercise until I was out of mandatory PE and could explore for myself the activities I liked and that worked for my body. My build, combined with increasing knee and hip problems, ensured I'd never be good at running--but to everyone's surprise I was great at the strength and flexibility stuff (insert eyerolling here).

[girlpunksamurai.livejournal.com]

Well crap, I'd be bitter to

Or wait, this is me....I'd be pissed to >.< stupid men...like I haven't kicked a man's ass a few times-upper body strength is good, but still...puh-lease. *snorts*