"Canada is facing an inactivity and obesity crisis whose impact on the cost of future chronic disease management is almost unimaginable. A potential solution is regular physical activity, which is associated with as much as a 30 per cent reduction in all causes of mortality rates."
ParticipAction: The Inactivity Crisis
WITH the admonition to keep it fun, ParticipAction urges parents to enrol their children in sports and teams at the earliest opportunity to get them started on a lifetime of physical fitness.
Emphasizing "it's the physical activity that counts - not the competition" it goes on to list depressing statistics about the results of inactivity in our youth, including the fact that 93 per cent are not active enough and that one in five 15-year-olds already has high blood pressure and cholesterol readings.
Whether or not those national statistics hold true in British Columbia, the overall picture is serious enough to prompt the question: What can we do to turn the numbers around and head off what appears to be a looming health crisis?
Conversations with North Vancouver's Diana Chan, president of Basketball B.C., and with her fellow North Shore community basketball coach, Vanda Termansen, put a local perspective on the problem.
Given the number of youth soccer games on neighbourhood fields, and the number of recreation facilities, sport groups, coaches and fitness centres available throughout the North Shore, I was surprised to hear Chan and Termansen echo ParticipAction concerns.
Surely, I thought, after reading countless North Shore News reports of high-school tournaments and athletes' personal achievements, it is logical to assume all is well with North Shore activity levels?
But despite the passion she and other coaches share for their own sport, Chan says specialization can actually be part of the problem.
"If we want to encourage people to stay active for a lifetime, children need exposure to a multi-sport experience," she said.
Chan disagrees with the specialization she sees happening at an ever-younger age - and she means in elementary-aged children.
"When a child shows some potential in a particular area, there is a tendency to over-coach them to the exclusion of other activities," she explained. "And when that happens, there is a loss of the pure enjoyment in being active and alive that every child is born with."
Although not in the same words and recognizing every school is different, Termansen also believes physical education in the general sense is disappearing from school curriculums.
If that impression is confirmed by detailed analysis, the first-hand experience of Doug Green, past-principal of Sutherland secondary, will be invaluable in his new position as a North Vancouver recreation commissioner.
When it comes to the importance of physical education in the school curriculum, Green is unequivocal: "I support PE for all K-12 students," he began.
"The amount of time should increase as students move through primary, intermediate and secondary grades.
"At the secondary-school level, students could have PE scheduled every other day if physical activity is built into other classes [and] it's desirable to have at least one PE specialist teacher on staff at both elementary and secondary schools."
The essential nature of Green's recommendations is not only highlighted by his follow-up comments, the alarm bells also ring loud and clear in the findings of a report released last year by the McCreary Centre Society.
Based on data gathered in a 2008 Adolescent Health Survey, the Picture of Health Report paints a clear picture of the relationship between lack of participation in physical activity and poor outcomes for youth and young adult health and high-risk behaviours.
It goes without saying those problems are magnified when poverty is thrown into the mix.
As Green emphasized, drug and alcohol use by teens is a community concern. "In my 35 years in education," he said, "use of alcohol was not a concern during school hours, but was an issue at social events.
"However, some students do choose to use drugs during the school day; that is not only detrimental to their own education, it can negatively impact the educational opportunities of other students."
When the topic of declining access to schoolbased PE programs arose during my earlier conversation with Termansen, I asked whether school administrations were aware of this trend.
That was the point where she, too, raised the matter of students' drug and alcohol use, "I may be wrong," she said, "but I think some school staffs are so under-resourced and so busy fending off substance abuse, they may not even be aware of the trend away from physical activity."
So this is where we come to the vital roles parents and communities must play in the equation.
From local discussions about redesigning the Harry Jerome centre and about bare school district budgets, we know government interventions cannot be the sole solution.
On the flip side, it benefits all of us when we encourage equal access to physical education for all K-12 students - within the regular curriculum and blind to a family's ability to pay for specialized equipment and club memberships - because it is the physical activity that counts, not just the competition.
