Top tips: how can PE and school sport help students stay healthy?

From pedometers to healthy Come Dine With Me clubs, physical education experts share their ideas for improving pupil wellbeing from our recent live chat.

Get pupils to wake and shake in lessons 
 

Brain function decreases after 17 minutes of sitting still. I know of lots of innovative primary schools that make sure children aren’t sitting for more than 15 minutes at a time. I have seen some wonderful literacy lessons delivered through physical activity, such as children acting out the story. With approaches like this, alongside a high quality PE and sport programme, schools can help young people achieve their 60 active minutes a day.

Alison Oliver, chief executive of the Youth Sport Trust.

Take a cross-curricula approach

PE shouldn’t be just within the fabric of the sports hall. For example, in maths and food technology you can compare data on athletic times and calorie count over a six-week period to predict outcomes. Or, to motivate disaffected groups in languages, it’s not uncommon to run a sports days in a different language. History and sport also play a great part in Britain and abroad. Henry VIII was a massive advocate of sport and there are many opportunities for projects between the history and PE department.

Steve Sallis, head of education and player welfare at Millwall Football Club.

Track how students are doing with a scorecard

Every Thursday our entire year 7 cohort arrive at school in their PE kit and take part in a physical activity instead of having their normal form time. They have a “personal best” scorecard, which lists performance measures linked to fitness levels, and work with a health mentor who designs activities around improving their performance over time. We deliver it on a day when the kids already have PE (to help with logistics) and have an all-inclusive “fun club” after school, which has fantastic levels of attendance.

Kevin Byrne, sport and health development leader at Bebington high sports college.

Rethink the layout of the playground 
 

Zoning the playground to ensure ball games don’t dominate and there’s space for a range of activities can inspire and empower a wider variety of pupils to “play” at playtime. Equally, training lunchtime supervisors to organise and lead activity has proven effective. Some of the most innovative and exciting work I have seen is where children are trained to lead and organise peer-led activities. Youth sport leadership not only increases participation, but is a powerful way of developing skills that are important to learning and life, such as communication, organisation and self-reflection.

The secret of fast runners: symmetry

Scientists can predict the best sprinters among elite runners just by looking at their knees.

 

To be a swift runner you need strong muscles, a powerful heart, determination and — symmetrical knees? That’s what scientists learned when they studied some of the world’s top sprinters.

Science has shown that animals and people with more symmetrical bodies tend to be stronger and healthier than those who are a bit lopsided. But this is the first time researchers have been able to predict who will be the fastest runners just by measuring their knees.

“Among the very best sprinters in the world, knee symmetry predicts who’s going to be the best of the best,” says Robert Trivers of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N. J. As an evolutionary biologist, he studies how organisms have adapted over generations to their environments.

His team published its new findings online November 17 in the journal PLOS ONE.

Trivers knew symmetrical knees could aid runners. In an earlier study, he showed that children who at age 8 had more symmetrical knees developed into the fastest runners by the time they were 22. Now he wanted to know why symmetry made such a difference in top athletes.

To find out, he brought a team of researchers to the island nation of Jamaica in the Caribbean. They measured the knees, ankles, and feet of 73 elite sprinters at the MVP Track and Field Club in Kingston. Jamaican Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce was among the athletes studied. She won Olympic gold medals in the 100-meter (328-foot) sprint in both 2008 and 2012.

 

The researchers then took the same measurements from 116 local non-runners who were about the same ages and sizes as the elite athletes.

“Elite sprinters had more symmetrical knees than normal people,” Trivers says. “Their ankles were also slightly more symmetrical.” But their feet were not special. “It seems the feet are completely irrelevant,” he concludes.

Why the World Cup Suddenly Has So Many Goals

NASA engineer Rabindra Mehta explains the aerodynamics of the World Cup soccer ball.

 

You know the star players’ names of this World Cup: Brazilian forward Neymar, United States goalkeeper Tim Howard, Argentinian forward Lionel Messi. But there is one star that you may not have heard of, even though it has played in every single game this year. It’s called Brazuca, and it is a soccer ball.

When the World Cup was first played, in 1930, balls came in all sorts of designs, the most popular featuring 11 interlocking T-shaped leather panels laced together by hand. Legend says that when Italy hosted the second World Cup in 1934, Mussolini required that an Italian-made ball be used. France demanded a locally-made ball as well, when it played host in 1938. In 1970, the era of standardization started when Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) named Adidas as the official ball provider for the World Cup.

For the 2006 World Cup, Adidas introduced a new ball called Teamgeist, which created some turbulence off the field. With its 14 panels and glossy texture, Teamgeist was the smoothest ball ever—which proved to be a disaster. Shots did not fall where strikers expected them to, and goalkeepers struggled to predict flight patterns. Even David Beckham struggled to “bend it like Beckham.” While Adidas attempted to address these complaints with their 2010 ball, called Jabulani (or “rejoice” in the Bantu languages of South Africa), players still complained the ball felt “supernatural,” and had a mind of its own. The 2010 tournament ended with 147 goals, fewer than any other since the tournament was changed to the 64-game format in 1998.