Lots of former athletes put on weight when they stop training, for the simple reason that they keep their old eating habits while burning much fewer calories.
I’ve also met a lot of overweight guys, who are overweight because they don’t get much exercise, and who don’t get much exercise because they can’t, due to old sports injuries from high school.
Now, granted, that’s mostly due to a few particularly dangerous sports like football. But those dangerous sports are also quite popular, so it still has a large net effect.
I also suspect that unpleasant experiences with sports and “physical education” have led to a lot of people avoiding exercise in favor of (not very effective) attempts to starve themselves thinner with diets because of just how bad their childhood memories are. Bad enough that being constantly hungry is better than re-living them.
We basically train people to hate exercise, and then puzzle at why we have an obese population.
I know this is anecdote versus anecdote…
but in the environment of our teenage children I see lots and lots of young ones going to gym and quite a lot even being real Gym Rats. Also gym lingo is ubiquitous in today’s youth .
Well, if their experiences were less unpleasant or their drive for physical fitness strong enoguh to override any bad experiences, more power to them. It’s not like exercise is bad, after all.
However, those people are CHOOSING to be there.
And, one hopes, not exercising to the point of self-injury.
One of the great advantages of coed gym classes is that female coaches usually aren’t insane, and if the male coaches try that “run until you puke” shit the females are much more likely to tell them to pound sand and vocally bitch to Admin. (At least at my high school. I’ll admit that that probably isn’t the norm everywhere. Especially Texas. spit)
That’s if co-ed gym means both male and female gym teachers. There are a lot of good reasons for that to be the case, but I wouldn’t count on Texas doing it anyway.
Yeah. You didn’t know Miss Dalton.
She was a maniac.