Two falsehoods in the bicycling world

There's a lot of junk wisdom in the bicycling world, especially in the shops where money is exchanged for high-markup products. What I'd like to discuss today has to do with two falsehoods that have been successfully sold to the cycling world's collective conscious. I realize that this is specific information irrelevant to most person's lives, but on the other hand, this is what we've come to expect from Just Enough Craig, is it not?

Falsehood 1: Clipless pedals allow you to pull up on the pedal to generate more power.

First of all, let's all agree that “clipless pedal” is the worst name you could give to a pedal that you clip onto. For those who don't know, there are three basic pedal types: stomp, clip, and clipless. Stomp pedals are the ones you had on your childhood dirt bike; the foot rests on the pedal, and nothing holds the foot in place. Clip pedals are stomp pedals with an attached strap or cage that encloses the toe-end of the foot. Clipless pedals are the ones that require a cleated shoe and are the cause of countless cyclists tipping over after coming to a stop at red lights and stop signs.

Tipping over aside, there are many great reasons to ride with clipless pedals: they give the rider better control over the bike; they're easier to “dial in” to the right position relative to the foot; they're more comfortable. But what clipless don't offer is more power—at least not sustainable power. The salesman at the bike shop will often make a claim to a cycling newbie about how clipless pedals allow the rider to “pull up” during the pedal's upstroke using one's hamstrings, thus allowing the rider to generate more power. Sometimes the salesman will quantify the effect, such by saying “20% more power” or “one-third more power”.

This is utter nonsense. If you don't believe me, find a clip or clipless bicycle and try riding around only pulling up on the pedal during the upstroke. What you will soon discover is that it's immensely difficult to generate but an insignificant amount of power despite a generous amount of exertion. Simply put, the human body is poorly suited for generating much power with a leg-lifting movement like the one needed to pull up on a bicycle pedal. Contrast pulling up with pushing down on the pedal, where an easy effort will achieve a respectable speed. Pulling up is clearly a no-go for power generation.

As it turns out, after a few minutes of regular riding (about the time when you've stopped consciously thinking about your pedal stroke's form), you may realize that contrary to pulling up even a little bit during the upstroke, your rising foot is actually pushing down on the pedal, thus negating some of the work being done by the other leg. This is normal. But it is indeed a waste of effort, for though the body is poorly suited for generating power in a leg-raising movement, it's efficient at lifting the leg when the leg is not under load. The optimum pedal stroke doesn't involve pulling up on the pedal during the upstroke, but it does involve lightly lifting the rising leg such that the foot neither pulls nor pushes the pedal. You can do this with any of the three pedal types.

Falsehood 2: Carbon frames are more comfortable.

Ask any bike shop salesman, and you'll soon learn that aluminum is the least comfortable frame material and steel and carbon are the most comfortable. The idea behind this is that steel and carbon better absorb the small shocks of the road—i.e., jitter—than does aluminum, and so they make for more comfortable bikes.

While there may be some truth to this, whatever jitter-absorbing difference there exists between frame materials is insignificant and shouldn't factor into one's decision-making process when choosing a bicycle. People who buy carbon because of its silky smoothness are buying a bicycle made out of placebo.

A little thought about the matter reveals what you need to know. Between the pothole and the rider, there are many parts on the bike absorbing the jarring shock. From the ground up there are: tires, rims, fork and frame (and seat stay), and saddle. Most of the shock is absorbed through the tires and saddle—the “cushioned” parts. The “non-cushioned” parts, including that expensive carbon frame, absorb a small if not negligible fraction of the shock. Thus, the frame material cannot have much effect on the jitter-related comfort of the bicycle as compared to, say, replacing the tires or choosing a better saddle. This may be worth keeping in mind if you'd like to avoid buying a placebo-frame bicycle.

Balance

Last year while I was in the restroom before the Thanksgiving Day Turkey Trot 5 km race, I overheard two guys talking. They knew each other but hadn't seen each other in a while, and the topic soon turned to their expectations for the race. The lesser fit guy said that he hadn't been running much and didn't expect to do well. The other guy, who looked every bit like a good runner, replied, “That just means you've found balance.”

I think I know exactly where that second guy was coming from in his response. Somehow, in these four-plus years I've lived in Phoenix, my social network has transformed itself into a rather lopsided and biased sample of fit people. Other than my coworkers, most people I know and see on a regular basis are into running, bicycling, and/or triathlons, and they're fit. Many aren't your doing-a-race-to-finish types; they're marathoners and ultra-distance racers and humblingly strong cyclists. It's an integral part of their lives.

Just as fish probably have little understanding of the water they spend the entirety of their lives within, it's easiest to lose sight of the importance of an activity exactly when you're most surrounded by it. For me, I get a double-helping between my Ironman triathlete friends and some rather good cyclists who I ride with. In both cases, the people involved are not just doing these activities; rather, these activities have a way of owning their participants. You can't be either one of these types of people unless you are committed to it. Commitment is the necessary path to success, but it is the antagonist of balance.

Once a person decides to get off that couch and start moving, any worthwhile discussion of fitness will inevitably broach the subject of balance. How much is enough? When you're firmly inside the world of the fit, there's always someone else faster and fitter than you. But many are only a little faster and fitter, and their level of performance is reachable. By trading hours spent training for seconds gained on race day, you can beat them. But how much is enough?

One of the more common mistakes made in understanding fitness is the assumption that more is never enough. There's a dualism that separates lifestyle choices into good and bad, and the pursuit of fitness is put squarely in the good category. Thus, it follows, spending a lot of time and a lot of money pursuing fitness is a worthy way to spend one's life. Often we hear others state goals of putting in more training time or perhaps upgrading their bicycle or equipment, but infrequently do we hear goals like: “I want to cut down on my training during the weekends. I want to spend less money on fitness stuff.”

I won't argue against the point that there are many good ways to live a life. Regarding fitness, going for broke is not automatically a bad thing. However, I will make a few points.

• Fitness is indeed underrated, even in our vain, image-crazy mass society. Most of us younger people are underrating the real possibility for preventable chronic, decades-long health problems brought about by sedentary lifestyles, and we're overestimating the ability of a quickly-becoming-dysfunctional health care system to fix our future problems.

• There's no substitute for physical activity. No amount of healthy, organic eating and traditional or non-traditional medicine will make up for our genetic need to be out and doing something, even if that's just walking several miles a day.

• There's also no substitute for oral hygiene. Gums that are chronically infected can lead to heart disease and other systemic health problems seemingly unrelated to the mouth, yet for all the talk that fit people make about having healthy, strong hearts, there's a strange lack of emphasis on the basics, like flossing.

The point about flossing may seem a bit strange, and yet it serves as a springboard for the overall point I'm trying to make. I've claimed previously that the optimum amount of exercise per week is ten hours. That's about one hour per day most days of the week and one long session of several hours once per week. Incidentally, this can be carried out by walking or biking to work and doing one “traditional” exercise session on the weekend, like going for a long hike or medium-distance bike ride. When you integrate physical activity into your real life, ten hours accumulate in a hurry. But I digress; this is not intended as an anti-car post.

The marginal return on exercise past ten hours seems so marginal that I suspect that, on average, no amount of additional exercise past those ten hours makes up for not flossing regularly. Put another way, exercising more than ten hours per week better deliver something of value to one's life other than perceived healthiness. Real-world people have jobs and families and social involvements and real commitments. There's nothing wrong with spending more than ten hours per week exercising—it's just an estimate I came up based on personal observation and is not based on anything scientific—but to do so with the expectation that doing so is automatically good and worthwhile is dangerous. Maybe our jobs and most probably our families and friendships and other non-fitness commitments and goals will benefit us more after devoting more time to them than will a new 5 km PR time will benefit us. This doesn't make pursuing that 5 km PR time a bad thing. Rather, it shifts the focus away from “more” and towards “balance”.

In and out

It's hard not to laugh a bit when reminded “remember to breathe” by a trainer or other advice-giver when exercising. However, breathing is important for obvious and non-obvious reasons, and doing it right takes most people some practice.

Ignoring the obvious reasons why breathing matters, here's an explanation of the non-obvious. With the exception of anaerobic exercise, like weightlifting or any other activity that lasts less than about a minute, physical exertion requires oxygen, and the amount of power you generate is nearly directly proportional to how much oxygen your body absorbs and uses.

There's nothing magical about this. At the cellular level, most calories (energy) you burn come from sugar molecules. These molecules are held together by bonds that release the energy when broken. Your body breaks down such a molecule by using a fixed amount of oxygen. X calories, Y units of oxygen; 2X calories, 2Y units of oxygen. Thus, the number of calories expended when exercising aerobically (or not exercising at all, since being idle is an aerobic activity) is limited by how much oxygen your body can absorb and use. No breathing equals no energy consumption equals no power.

In case this isn't clear, I'll restate another way: no matter your level of fitness, whether you're a beginner or elite athlete, the amount of energy you consume is limited by how much oxygen you absorb and use. It stands to reason, then, that you don't want your upper bound to be set by something you have conscious control over, like breathing. Rather, you want the upper bound to be set by something you don't have conscious control over, like how fast your heart pumps oxygen-rich blood to the muscles.

You see, there are many potential bottlenecks in delivering oxygen to those sugar-burning muscle cells. Firstly, there's how much oxygen you're inhaling. After the oxygen is in the lungs and is available for absorption into the blood, there are several other possible limiters: (1) how much oxygen is absorbed per unit volume of blood, (2) how fast the blood is circulated through the body, and (3) how efficiently the muscles absorb oxygen from the blood. Fit persons' bottleneck is nearly always some combination of the first two: the efficiency of the cardiovascular system. (This is why professional endurance athletes such as cyclists are tempted to take drugs that boost the carrying capacity of the blood (e.g., EPO and blood doping) and/or drugs that stimulate the heart into pumping faster and harder.) However, unfit persons' bottleneck may be the third reason: the efficiency of the muscles absorbing oxygen. Though, it turns out that, on average, the muscles are capable of improving their efficiency by two- or three-fold, whereas the maximum efficiency improvement of the cardiovascular system is around one-fourth or one-half for most people. In other words, if you're unfit and your muscles can maximally absorb 1 unit of oxygen per unit time, then by becoming fit your muscles will maximally absorb 2 or 3 units of oxygen per unit time; your cardiovascular system will increase its capacity only from 1 unit to 1.25 to 1.5 units. It turns out that usually after a few months of training, the muscles will have grown past the capacity of the cardiovascular system and are no longer the bottleneck. This should make some sense with personal observation; unfit persons' muscles often feel sore after doing aerobic activities like running or swimming, but after a few months they stop feeling sore.^*

This all may sound like a lot, but there's not much to it, conceptually. Once you're past the first few months of training, your performance is limited by how much blood you can deliver to your muscles. In this light, aerobic exercise can be abstracted and generalized to this: the process of making yourself become sufficiently out of breath and then remaining in that state for an extended duration. That's how you increase the capacity of your cardiovascular system. There's pretty much no way around this; if you're not at least a little out of breath, you're simply not training hard enough. Furthermore, the more fit you become, the more out of breath you should be and the longer you should be out of breath. Of course, what you gain by your improved fitness is power—i.e., speed.

So remember to breathe. Drop that jaw, open that mouth wide, and breathe big and deep and fast. The route from the starting line to the finish line is full of energy-unlocking oxygen, so use it up.

[*] I think this has to do with how unfit persons' muscles recruit anaerobic processes to generate a significant percentage of power, even when the activity being performed is typical an aerobic one, like running. Furthermore, a fit person who is trained for a single activity limited to specific muscle groups, such as how cycling is mainly limited to the lower body, may find his muscles wholly unfit when switching to a different activity that uses different muscles groups, such as swimming and the use of the upper body. I think this is why fitness in one activity does not always translate to fitness in another activity and is a strong argument in favor of cross-training.

Thick and thin

Like many other kids, I too enjoyed playing with Lego. Between my sister and I, we amassed a large tub of pieces numbering probably a few thousand. But from all those pieces and countless possibilities I don't remember constructing much of anything that wasn't precisely prescribed by the instructions from the various sets we had. Never did it cross my mind that I could take the pieces from half a dozen individual castles and create one enormous one. Thus the toy so well known for fostering children's creativity was to me a vehicle for following someone else's vision and instructions.

Anyone paying attention at the time could have extrapolated that I'm not a terribly imaginative person. That people sometimes think that I do have lots of interesting ideas (as an adult) haven't caught on that what I really have are an interesting mix of sources. As Einstein is known to have said, “The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.” Lately Laura has been reading a book on peak oil at my insistence. Surprisingly, she's enjoying it. Less pleasantly, she's told me that she now realizes that my ideas about our current civilization drawn from a comparative historical approach are not my own. So much for following Einstein's advice and hiding one's sources.

All this may seem like a strange way to introduce the topic of bicycle tire sizes, but there's a point here. It's easy to treat bicycles as I treated my Lego sets: something to be used as someone else envisioned. Watch a bike mechanic take apart or put together a bicycle and you realize just how interchangeable most everything on a bicycle is. Admittedly, most interchanging of parts is not something that typical people have an interest or need to do, and bike tinkering will and should remain squarely in the realm of the competitive and enthusiastic for the foreseeable future. However, there is one bit of tinkering that makes a whole lot of sense even for regular folk, and that is putting the best-sized tire on one's bike.

I'm writing mainly about road bikes here because it is road bikes that have so obviously fallen victim to a particular fashion that doesn't provide much real benefit. That fashion is the seat tube cut-out and the modern practice of using such tight clearances between tire and frame that most road bikes made today cannot be used with tires wider than the standard 700x23 slick or possibly the slightly larger 700x25. What makes this unfortunate is that for a great many people riding road bikes today, they should be using a larger—wider—tire.

The disadvantages of using a larger tire are purely performance-related. Larger tires are heavier and have more rolling resistance and are thus slower. Also, they make the bike harder to turn quickly around corners. Thus, if you're solely focused on speed, smaller, thinner tires are the way to go. Obviously, I'm not writing for you if you are one of these people. However, if you're not so focused on speed, then the advantages of using a larger tire are probably more beneficial than the disadvantages are detrimental. The advantages have to do with better control. Simply put, the fatter the tire, the more sand, gravel, and other road surface impedimenta it takes to cause the bike to lose control. I once crashed in a parking lot while riding 700x23-size tires for no reason than that my front wheel happened to fit within a groove between two slabs of pavement and I lost the ability to steer my bike. That wouldn't have happened with a bigger tire.

I personally happen not to be too afraid of crashing, but a lot of people do not adopt my reckless attitude towards cycling. For example, many triathletes are out there on the bike because, well, they have to be. Commuters tend to be more interested in getting to their destination in one piece rather than arriving at the fastest possible speed. Even many weekend cyclists clad in brightly colored Lycra and looking otherwise expert value safety over speed. For many people, cycling can be a downright nerve-racking experience. To anyone who feels this way, a bigger tire is probably the way to go.

But to equip a bicycle with a bigger tire, the tire must first fit. Most clincher rims will accept bigger tires, but many modern frames will not. This makes for an important thing to check for and consider when purchasing a bicycle: what largest size tire will the bicycle allow for? Buying a bicycle that fits a wide range of tire sizes will allow you to be creative later and make the bike what you want it to be and not just what the bike shop envisioned.

Thoughts about nutrition

The next time you're in the grocery store walking down the cereal aisle, check out the different kinds of oatmeals. For those of you who are not oat enthusiasts like me, you may be surprised to discover how many different kinds of oatmeals there are: instant oat, quick oats, old-fashioned rolled oats, and steel-cut oats. Many people haven't heard of steel-cut oats. Rather than being rolled flat into a soft, fluffy morsel, a steel-cut oat—sometimes called a groat—has a hard nutty texture that more resembles a Grape Nut than a traditional oat. But chemically it's the same oat as any other.

While you're checking out the different oatmeals, note their nutritional profiles. What you'll see is that each oat is nutritionally identical to the others according to the standard nutrition label. Given an equal serving size by weight, each has the same amount of fat; carbohydrates, including sugar and fiber; and protein. The only thing that differs is the volume of a serving; steel-cut oats are denser than the rolled oats and thus have a smaller serving size by volume, typically a ¼ cup instead of rolled oats' ½ cup.

This similarity is probably what you'd expect. Since the difference in oatmeals has to do with how the oat has been milled—what we called in elementary school science a physical change rather than a chemical change—their densities are different owing to each individual oat's different shape, but their nutritional profiles should be the same.

Only, there's one problem here. Try eating instant oats each morning for a week or two, and try eating steel-cut oats each morning for a different week or two. The sameness of their nutritional profiles suggests that there should be no difference in the effect of your body's digestion of the different oatmeals, but what you'll probably find is that steel-cut oats keep you feeling fuller longer. Not a lot longer, but longer nonetheless. How can this be?

The explanation has to do with the glycemic index, which is to say that steel-cut oats take longer for your body to digest. That they take longer to cook than instant oats is not coincidental; the physical shape of the individual oat itself determines its break-down period, whether it's cooking in a pot on your stove or breaking down into simple sugars in your gut. The standard nutrition label is helpless to explain this difference because it seeks to describe nutrition molecularly by classifying nutrients chemically. Some molecules are lipids; others are sugars and so on. But the macro-scale physical shape of a food particle can have a profound effect on its digestion.

Nutrition is more complicated than the standard nutrition label suggests. This complexity becomes evident when you begin mixing foods as we do in the real world for real meals. For example, fruit juice digests faster than actual fruit. Thus, you can opt for steel-cut oats for a longer, steadier source of energy through the morning hours but kill the result by drinking your breakfast orange rather than eating it. Or you could opt for the convenience of whole wheat toast, which, despite being a whole grain and supposedly healthful, is made from flour and is absorbed quickly by the body, but additionally eat two apples so as to slow down the body's digestion of the toast because apples are terribly fibrous and require lots of time for absorption even though they are chock full of sugar. Smother almond butter on the toast or better still, eat a few whole almonds. A pantry of just a few foods can lend itself to a combinatorial explosion of possibilities.

I think it's fair to generalize a broader point from this example, and that is this: a useful, practical understanding of nutrition does not follow from simple, linear cause-and-effect relationships. The healthfulness of a meal is not the simple sum of each food's constituent parts. Instead, the effect of any food you eat is dependent upon the context of the other foods that are eaten as well. As mentioned above, eating an apple or two will add a lot of sugar to a meal, but the end result is likely to be slower absorption of the rest of the meal than if one eats whole wheat bread instead of the apples, though the bread will have less sugar. Sometimes the differences are purely physical and not chemical, such as with different types of oats.

This is not a bad sort of complication. This doesn't mean that we're hopelessly ignorant of knowing what we should be eating. Rather, it means that often we can ignore the countless minute details of our foods' compositions and focus on the bigger picture. One of the more profound points I've discovered through years of trying to eat healthily is that in many ways the minutiae of calories, protein, fat, sugar, vitamins RDAs, and so on can and should be chucked to avoid drawing one's attention away from what really constitutes a healthful meal. And what makes such a meal? That is something each of us must learn on our own, first by learning some of the science but ultimately by listening to our bodies.

Forwards and backwards

I was planning on writing today's post about sharing some more of my knowledge of health and fitness I've acquired slowly over many years, but instead I find myself needing to write about a topic which I've quickly gained some firsthand knowledge: bike theft. Last Friday night my commuter/touring bicycle was stolen.

The story is a typical one. I left my locked up for (some amount less than) six hours on a Friday night in a public place—a transit station parking lot—and upon returning to the site, I found no evidence that my bicycle had ever been there. Gone. Vanished.

People are immediately sympathetic when they hear this story. Laura is taking it especially hard. She liked that bike a lot. I guess she had developed a certain familiarity with it. She also liked the orange handlebar tape.

I myself am not too distraught over it. Though the bike was worth a tidy sum and has me feeling embarrassed for leaving it susceptible to such easy theft, the bike was far from the perfect bike for me. I'm more into biking than I am into any specific bike, and I can rationalize that over the year-and-a-half I had it, I got in enough miles on it to have driven down the cost of ownership to about 30 or so cents per mile, which is about the same cost as a modest car. Also, I've been thinking these last few months that a road-only touring bike doesn't match my lifestyle optimally. There are a lot of great off-road trails here in Arizona and other states, and I've been facing the reality that my life isn't likely to make grand road touring a frequent event like how I hoped when I bought the bike. Maybe I can get something that fits me better.

Whatever that happens to be, the big lesson learned here is not to leave a good bike in a public place. Around-town bikes should be around-town bikes and nothing more—something so minimal and cheap that replacing it is no big deal. I already knew of such a bike; Saturday, the day after the theft, I called Coworker Nick and got him to sell me back my old flip-flop Schwinn, which never quite suited him. He brought it in to work this morning, and after inflating the tires and turning the rear wheel to the fixed-gear, I rode it home this afternoon. I never really liked the Schwinn either, and hopefully neither do thieves.

PE: basic skills

One of the best ways to enable people to get more physical activity in their lives is through adult sports leagues. And the best way to get people interested in playing sports (rather than watching them on TV) is by equipping people with the skills needed not to suck at them. It's no shock when a guy tries out playing in the local softball league and after a season of popping out to the middle infielders decides that drinking at the bar or staying home and playing video games is more fun.

The key word here is “competence”. We needn't be great at sports; we merely need to be able to fit in and feel like we're contributing (if playing a team sport) or are competitive (if playing a solo sport). That I was able to hang with playing indoor soccer for about a year is testament that you don't need super skills to find a league at your level. But you do need some skills.

Unfortunately, right when we have most need of becoming more physically active—sometime in early adulthood—is right around the age when we've become too old to learn new sports skills with the same effortless ease as we did as children. There's something about mind-body connections that make them much easier to develop with a younger brain than an older one, whether it's riding a bicycle, playing a musical instrument, or making our vocal cords speak a second language. The key, therefore, is to prioritize teaching children a viable set of general sports skills so that they feel comfortable at participating in a wide range of activities later in life.

I think kids can't get enough variety and balance in their educations, and physical education is no exception. However, some sports skills will pay back better than others. Today I'm proposing a list of the skills that I think every able-body child should develop competence in.

• Throwing and catching a ball

  The unfortunate reality for men whose fathers never played catch with them or at least took them to little league practice is that they're stuck looking like a girl whenever they throw for the rest of their lives! How shameful! Even girls should not look like girls when they throw. And catching should involve putting your body exactly in the path of the thing hurling towards you, not securing your safety first and making a stiff-arm reach for it off to the side.

  A fear of the ball is a perfectly natural, protective instinct, but it gets in the way of about half of the sports that are available in adult leagues. Thankfully, there's an exceptionally easy way to overcome this fear, and that's by spending lots of time in the backyard or park just tossing the ball. Split between Dad and little league, I probably spent over a thousand hours playing catch during my formative years, and the result is a firm mediocrity with throwing and catching that instantly makes me competent in many sports leagues—even sports I've never played. This is a skill that carries over well.

• Swinging a bat or club

  There's more to swinging than moving the arms; there's a subtle complexity or coordination of the whole body that allows one to generate real power. This power will translate well to the obvious activities like swinging for the fences in rec-league softball or driving for distance in golf as well as the less obvious activities like boxing and the martial arts. Learned early and it's easy; learned late in life and it's not.

• Running

  It may seem silly that there are people out there who don't know how to run, but I'll assert that most people don't know how to run. This is an observation I've made playing in a variety of sports leagues: most adults cannot move their body to where it needs to be with comfort and ease. There's more to running than moving the legs back and forth quickly, as evidenced by the massive number of people who decide to “do some races” and end up with all sorts of knee, foot, and hip problems.

  Even if we aren't Jamaican sprinters or Kenyan marathoners, each of us should at least be competent at sprinting and at enduring for longer distances. There's hardly a sport that doesn't benefit in some way from at least one of these two skills.

• Riding a bike

  “Just like riding a bike” really only applies to people who learned how to ride a bike as a kid. The rest are a wobbly folk who never quite develop the same fluid ease.

  This skill is not just my favorite; it's arguably the most important of the lot. Bicycling is not just recreation and fitness; it represents a whole new option for transportation that can dramatically reduce stress and expense in one's life. Not everyone needs to dress up in Lycra and ride in a double pace line on Saturday morning. But we all should be capable of riding a fat-tire bike to the store to pick up milk and bread. Our nation's reality is that most adults are terrified of doing that. Meanwhile, we're waiting for someone to invent an enjoyable, affordable, environmentally responsible vehicle for getting around town. The solution already exists. Teach your kids how to use it.

One could argue for additional skills that I haven't listed: swimming and kicking a ball would be two likely candidates. What are some other skills we should all know?

PE

Physical education is treated as one of the least necessary of subjects taught to children within the public school system, and yet a quick look around at today's children reveals that something is very wrong in making PE such a low priority. A longer look around will link this problem with rising overall health care costs and point to a potentially crippling social problem. I think back to my own brief physical education experience provided to me during my young years, and I think that whatever good I've done my body as an adult I've done despite that education, not because of it. This is to say that what is needed is not simply more of the same but rather a qualitatively better approach.

One idea is to chuck the sans philosophy attitude of traditional PE and to begin actively teaching kids the whys and wherefores of what they're doing. Of course, this won't work at too young of an age, probably before the capacity for symbolic thought has been attained, but at some point kids should begin to understand how their body works rather than blindly continuing to do their push-ups and hamstring stretches out of compliance.

This doesn't have to be deep or rigorously scientific stuff. A little knowledge can go a long way. For example, I began running independently as a teenager and have always had an above-average aerobic capacity, and yet it was only during my late-twenties that I stumbled upon the core of what aerobic exercise actually is: to absorb lots and lots of oxygen. As stupid is this is, until then I thought that the point was to get into good enough shape not to get out of breath; now I train with the understanding that the goal is the complete and utter opposite. A little more precisely, the energy output of the whole body is directly proportional to the input of the oxygen, and so more oxygen equals more power.

This is not rocket science, and kids don't need a health class or anatomy class substitute for PE, teaching them the Krebs cycle or other obscure textbook facts. Rather, we should be equipping all children with the basic understanding of good health rather than a habit of good health. A habit lasts only as long as one's environment does not change—not long at all—whereas an understanding lasts a lifetime.

Now, how do we implement this?