Making Exercise A Real Clothe Call
Newcastle Herald
Tuesday March 2, 2004
THE morning school run is a great time for parental creativity.
This is probably because our sleep-fuddled minds are desperately looking for a tangent to run off at anything rather than pay attention to what is actually going on inside the car.
It was a recent in-car experience, however, that inspired my latest tangent: the School Uniform Program, or SUP, a new approach to helping children avoid being overweight.
SUP is based on the standard dieters' rule: eat less, move more.
It will start off by insisting that all schools bring forward their starting time by five minutes without telling parents, buses or railways.
This may affect food intake by causing faster school-lunch packing with mass skimping on time-heavy activities such as buttering sandwiches, wrapping biscuits in plastic and making up sugary cordial.
More importantly, though, it will mean that every student will have to run to make it inside the school gates in time.
(The chronic latecomers, who already have to run, will just have to run faster. Imagine how this improvement in their personal best time will raise their self- esteem!)
Once the kids are inside the gates, the schools will use their extra five minutes to make sure girls are already wearing pantyhose and boys have belts and ties in place.
See how it works? Students will no longer be able to bring these essentials to school in their pockets and shove 'em on before class.
So they will have to put them on in the car, bus or carriage (I mean, get real: nobody's actually daggy enough to get fully dressed at home).
If Miz is anything to judge by, the effort of putting on pantyhose in the car while sitting down, without undoing the seat-belt, is enough to equal a good hour's organised workout at a gym.
There's the right-leg-haul, left-leg-haul, bottom-lift movement, then there's the hip-wriggle that gets the waistband in place, and finally the self-discipline of tying shoelaces blind while staring ahead and pretending nothing unusual is going on.
Pisces works just as hard.
Ever since his latest growth spurt went up, not out, his shorts have been too big.
This means he has to wear a belt, which he threads while seated, sharpening his fine motor skills and putting abdominal and leg muscles through a fairly gruelling session.
It's bad enough when kids have to do this in the car.
If they were doing it on a bus or train, presumably juggling their backpacks on their laps to cover their efforts, the exercise would surely be even more beneficial.
As for putting on ties, well, admittedly, there's not too much physical activity involved in that.
But if you hate ties as much as Destructo does you have to come up with some pretty inventive excuses to avoid the shame of wearing one.
This has to be a good thing. Educational types are always moaning about boys not being as good at English at girls; well, we can look on tie excuses as a gender-specific daily intensive exercise in creative writing.
The only problem I can see with my SUP program is that it's school-based. There has to be some way of tricking kids into exercising while not at school, say, while sitting in front of the computer.
Here, fortunately, Pisces can help.
He has recently taken up skate-boarding. But he's finding it difficult to adjust to the sk8-boy wardrobe style, which, he says, makes him look like a little kid who's just learned to dress himself.
Maybe so. But those big shoes mean he has to jiggle around constantly to fit them under the computer console.
The huge shirt gets caught on furniture and makes him keep shifting his arms and shoulders.
The hanging tabs and drawstrings are irresistible to cats whose attacks lead to a lot of healthy jumping and screaming.
And the enormous floppy long-shorts are a terrible temptation to little brothers who want to sneak up and pants him which means computer sessions are constantly interrupted for a brisk chase-Destructo, throttle-Destructo bout.
When Pisces gets dressed these days he no longer exercises taste, he tastes exercise.
© 2004 Newcastle Herald