Month: January 2007

Well, many folks in our world are really afraid of big men. Fear drives some of the stranges actions by those less challenged by gravity.

I often find myself most comfortable with men my size… larger men… because we understand each other. We don’t fall into the ‘normal range’ of the BMI (body mass index) because our bones are bigger and denser and we are more thickly muscled…. and we ride Harley’s.  That’s the way it is.

We do get strange looks from smaller men — not all — but some generally act with  what we jokingly refer to as ‘castration anxiety.’ As for me, personally, I prefer fried bull testicles… so there should be no worries.

So, here comes a study about ‘overweight’ young football players from the athletically challenged:

“Researchers at Iowa State University found nearly half of the offensive and defensive linemen playing on Iowa high school teams qualify as overweight, and one in 10 meet medical standards for severe obesity.”

Read on and you will discover that they worry about who will be our children’s ‘role models’ and they fret impotently about the ‘obesity’ epidemic in America. However, the real worry shouldn’t be about these big athletic young athletes… because they are at least ‘active’…. one should be concerned about why others are going fat… and this is highly correlated with the limitation or elimination of physical education in high school and the reduction of recess in the lower grades. 

If this wasn’t bad enough, all too many sports have been banned on the playground in schools today… from the ‘high bars’ to swingsets to dodgeball to anything ‘competitive’, it really shouldn’t shock us that kids are inactive…. because these same sorts of people are encouraging them to be this way…. it’s ‘cooperation not competition’ taken to extremes.

There is a real lesson here. Years ago, a heart specialist told me … he was one of my workout partners at UCLA while I was an athlete there… “you can never rebuild your cardiovascular system in middle age if you neglect it in your youth”. The morale is simple: we are doing far greater harm by not insisting on a vigorous athletic youth than criticising — say football players — for being naturally bigger than the average soccer player… which — as we know — is a non sport.

So, let’s encourage our youth to participate in a sport… any real sport… they’ll thank you for it later.

Roger Freberg

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