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Physical Education From The Past
The video below highlights an early physical education program from La Sierra High School in California. As you watch the clip, you may be surprised at the physical ability of the teenagers seen within. Many youngsters today are not aware of the tremendous physical strength that was often on display in previous generations. As I have said many times before, strength is not new.
A related article from a 1962 magazine can be accessed by clicking the image below (courtesy of this site).
As I watched the video above, I wondered how many high school students today could perform such feats as easily as those seen throughout the clip. Call it a hunch, but I’m guessing the percentage is quite low. Today’s youngsters are more apt to play videos games than do anything that is physically challenging. Many schools have even removed physical education from the required curriculum. And while I could easily go off on a rant about our educational system, I will refrain from spiraling out of control in that direction.
There is more than enough to rant about by focusing solely on the physical ability of these teens from the 50s and 60s. So many of today’s young trainers and so-called gurus spend their days arguing trivial details regarding health and fitness. You know the type. They spend their days citing research conducted on three field mice to hide the fact that they can’t do anything remotely impressive and have never trained anyone. They’ll spend all day searching the PubMed database to find something that in some way justifies their latest argument.
Meanwhile, we can look back over fifty years ago to a much simpler time. The young men seen above thrived long before today’s supplement saturated world of fitness. These individuals didn’t spend their days arguing over rep ranges, supplement stacks, periodization models, and exercise equipment. They thrived on the basics. They worked hard. They remained consistent.
The results that came from their approach are easy to see. Hard work with the basics has always been an effective model for physical development. While many become lost in today’s often confusing and contradictory world of fitness, others continue to grind it out with a simplistic yet challenging approach. They don’t get lost in trivial details. They don’t succumb to paralysis by analysis. They work today, always eager to come back and work hard again tomorrow.
I doubt our nation will ever see a physical education program like that seen above, but we can still learn from their approach. The average person can do very well with a very simple exercise program. The specifics of the program usually means less than what the individual is willing to put into the program. A highly determined person who continually puts forth a true effort will succeed with almost anything.
Don’t get lost in the details and don’t be fooled to believe that you need all of the answers on day one. Start with the basics and expand your repertoire over time. The results will come soon enough as you continue to put in the work.
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People who pride themselves on their “complexity” and deride others for being “simplistic” should realize that the truth is often not very complicated. What gets complex is evading the truth. – Thomas Sowell
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The gym class of today consists of playing games and taking a few written exams.
I feel that it should be more about learning and executing hard intense physical exercise as well as proper nutrition education. Basically gym class should allow everyone the knowledge of 90% of all personal trainers out there. I do not believe it should be all about having fun and playing games because the point is totally missed we spend more time throwing or kicking balls at each other than we do learning how the body works adapts and changes through proper exercise and diet not to mention all the positives that come from such.
I find it sad that we really have to reach and search for true information on physical fitness and diet, I was in the same boat I had no idea about nutrition or physical fitness until I started hanging around boxers and mixed martial artists. It wasn’t until then that I furthered my own education and awareness on the matter and what a world that opened up for me!!! My point is this is something that should have been instilled in me during highschool! And we wonder why we have such a poor health epidemic in our country, it all stems from lack of education.
What I like about this clip is that while the movements have a skill element to keeop the challenge and interest up it is not so high as to constitute a technical challenge in and of itself (for example, climbing using wooden pegs is a difficult skill but not so much as learning a musical instrument). Meanwhile the fun element is really high and will sustain the student’s interest. Good find, Ross.
Amen … Great reminder of what P.E. and physical fitness should be about !
“Don’t get lost in the details and don’t be fooled to believe that you need all of the answers on day one. Start with the basics and expand your repertoire over time. The results will come soon enough as you continue to put in the work.”
Agreed. Hard work and knowledge of the basics go a long way. A little bit of knowledge of the rep ranges, proper execution of the basic exercises, diet and sleep is all one needs when starting out. Everything else, like the number of sets or training frequency, one has to find out for him/herself by paying attention to the progress or the lack thereof. It will take some time, but you’ll also learn a lot about your body in the process.
My daughter came home the other day and told me that for PE they watched a movie about sports! I swear to God I am not making this up WTF!!!
Thank goodness I have them in brazilian jiu jitsu 3x a week so they can get some real sweat going.
I wonder how many of those kids stuck with it when they got older.
Most of those were not your standard exercises, either.
Good stuff!
That was very cool! Even more surprising, at least to me, is that the program only took 15 minutes a day. It would be so easy to replicate it now, if the will was present. (Maybe it can’t trump video games and current diet habits, but at least it would be a good start.) It seems to have been exceptional back then as well, unfortunately.
This was fantastic Ross, thanks for posting. I tried to dig up more on this program. It was created by a man named Stan LeProtti and these kids only exercised, albeit vigorously, for 15 minutes a day!! That one blond haired kid on the parallel bars was jacked! I love reading about the exercise programs from the 50s and 60s very interesting stuff. Thanks again.
Not surprisingly I did not see one overweight kid in the group. Just imagine a photo of this group alongside a photo of similar school age kids today.
Wow, that’s rigorous! I never knew they were so much more keen than youngsters are today, I kinda wish my school was like that, and it’s shame that’s been lost in the 21st century, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be brought back!
While I do train with weights and have been for quite a long time, I feel the types of routines done by these high schoolers back in the Sixties are probably more beneficial for overall fitness. Of course using weights in conjunction with these types of exercises gives you the best of both worlds and is probably the best route to take. Glad to see these types of fitness routines have made their way back in the last dozen years or so, and I know by incorporating these types of routines into a weight training and running program has improved my fitness levels immensely.
Jeez I know for most of my time in high school I couldn’t do the stuff they were doing, especially that wall climb with the pegs!
I really like the takeaway here; consistency really trumps everything else. I know I’ve suffered in the past (and even recently!) from over analyzing everything trying to make sure I was doing the best workout, only to be drawn away to the next best thing
@Felix
It’s like anything else in that the more you do something the better you become at it. There are people who think they are in shape if they run 20-25 miles a week. But if that is the only exercise they do, the only thing they’re in shape for is to run some moderate long distances. They probably would be just as weak in the upper body as a person who sits around all day. You could get some buff weight pumper who benches 4 plates on each side and he could have a hard time climbing a 30-foot rope if he never does any other exercise other than weight training. You could get someone who could pump out hundreds of reps of bodyweight squats but would struggle to squat with a barbell equal to their bodyweight if their only exercise was high rep bodyweight stuff. Better to be well rounded than just a one trick pony.
Things were so much simpler then. No video games. No obesity epidemic. No school shootings. Very few drugs. Much fewer teenage pregnancies. Of course, things weren’t perfect. Some kid probably fell off the climbing wall and that was the end of that….
It’s hard to say what we could do differently today to recreate the “good old days”. People were frugal, tenacious, and had more discipline back then because their parents lived in the Great Depression and probably both world wars.
Unfortunately, I think we are going to have to learn things the hard way if we don’t wake up.
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This may be strange or simply just me, but I totally want to try that peg exercise. That looks like a great test and fun as well.
To many of us who went through La Sierra’s PE program, today’s interpretation is a bit amusing. We didn’t have a choice, LaProtti was dogmatic and authoritarian. There was heavy peer pressure and almost no regard for a student’s strength or health limitations. If you couldn’t pass muster, it was down to the lowly white trunks, who were basically the cast-offs. LaProtti practiced favoritism. The blue trunks were his success story. The golds and purples, his elites and the requirements for pull-ups, etc. to achieve elite colors was staggering. I was content to wear red because it was a saner and calmer place to get through the program.
The vid doesn’t show all the apparatus we used. From arms-only rope climbing to the ceiling in the basketball gym to the up and down, 30 ft. In length parallel bars… we had to do calistetics in perfect vocal sync and when indoors, floor slaps and foot sounds also had to be in perfect unison. We were drilled as if in the military (Vietnam was a word we barely knew) and some of the PE elites did give demos to our military.
It looks cool as a video but, given a choice, I would’ve skipped the miserable experience.