Let's cut gym class!

Time magazine has a story this week by John Cloud about new studies which refute the widely-held belief that kids who take physical education classes in school are more fit than kids who don't.

Researchers from the Peninsula Medical School in the United Kingdom presented their findings last week in Amsterdam at the European Congress on Obesity. After "a painstaking study of physical activity in 206 children ages 7 to 11 from three schools in and around Plymouth, on the southern coast of England," the researchers discovered that "no matter how much P.E. they got during school hours, by the end of the day, the kids from the three schools had moved around about the same amount, at about the same intensity."

It turns out that the kids who had been required to take an average of 9.2 hours a week of gym class didn't run around much after school, while the kids who were in physical education class for just two or three hours a week were much more likely to engage in physical activities after 3:00 p.m.

In the final analysis, all the kids got about the same amount of exercise.

"The findings are remarkable," Time magazine declared.

In another study, published in the International Journal of Pediatric Obesity, researchers at the University of Exeter tracked 47 boys, ages 8 to 10, and found that kids in structured exercise programs were no more fit than kids who just did the normal things kids do. The researchers said kids should be told to go out and play, but there was no advantage to pushing them into organized P.E. programs or sports teams.

The studies are a pretty strong argument for using the valuable school hours to teach kids things they won't figure out on their own, like reading and math.

As you know if you've read "How to Make Money and Lose Weight," reading is the only skill you need to make money, and math is the only skill you need to lose weight.

Then again, I'll always treasure the memories of P.E. class.

That was sarcastic, if you couldn't tell.