Brain Fitness

“Brain Fitness”

 

Any one that has taught physical education is familiar with the shift from mainly focusing on sports skills to focusing on the fitness level of students. This time physical education teachers, instead of making a philosophical shift, they just need to add a new powerful dimension of fitness, BRAIN FITNESS.

 

What is brain fitness? Brain Fitness is a new term and a new phenomenon that is sweeping our country. Last year over $200 million dollars were spent in the US on brain fitness software alone. Brain fitness will soon grow to be a billion dollar industry in the United States.

 

How does brain fitness related to physical education.? I was one of the early pioneers shifting the focus of PE from sports to fitness. I spent the last 20 years of my teaching career trying to improve students’ bodies, and now I know how important the fitness is for the brain.

 

Of course Dr John Ratey from Harvard was the person responsible for educating me about “brain fitness”. If you have not picked up a copy of Dr Ratey’s book Spark, order it today from this website.

 

Dr Ratey went as far to say, “ I work out for my mind, and my body happens to benefit too.” Every physical education teacher in the country needs to learn more about “brain fitness”. We all need to have a basic understanding of the positive impact cardiovascular work outs and complex motor movements have on the brain.

 

PE4life Academies are having great success improving reading and math scores (and other academics subjects) using physical activity. For the last several years we  PE teachers have been complaining about No Child Left Behind having a negative impact on physical education programs. Many schools have cut back on PE time in order to improve academic performance. We now have research that proves cutting PE to improve academic scores does not make sense.

 

We (PE teachers) need to be the ones responsible for educating school boards, Superintendents, state legislators, parents, and anyone else responsible for making educational decisions about brain fitness.

 

There are so many resources for educating yourself on how to convince educational leaders about the importance of physical education improving brain fitness. A great place to start is Dr Ratey’s book SPARK, then pick up a copy of Brain Rules by Dr John Medina. Become familiar with Action Based Learning by Jean Blaydes Madigan. I also strongly recommend you bring a team to train at the Naperville PE4life Academy. PE4life offers one day training on Learning Readiness PE. What a great opportunity to see “brain fitness” in action. It is amazing to see an entire school embrace the importance of physical activity (PE) to learning. The data from Learning Readiness PE is amazing. Plus it is exciting to see Literacy teachers and math teachers speaking about PE can improve reading and math scores.

 

You have a responsibility to educate your community about brain fitness. You can be responsible for PE getting the respect it deserves.

 

 http://www.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/06/17/brain.fitness.ap/index.html