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Prioritize physical activity
Fitness experts say the key to getting an effective workout in a short time is focusing on compound exercises. PHOTO/COURTESY
What you need to know:
- The issue: Physical activity
- Our view: Engaging in regular safe and supervised physical activity could save one a lot of pain and bills accrued from trying to treat lifestyle diseases and this is not to mention the numerous other benefits of prioritizing sports.
The Ministry of Education and Sports has emphasized that schools should prioritise sports in their budgets as mandated by law. This initiative aims to encourage students to participate in sports and physical education, enhance health, and prevent lifestyle diseases from a young age.
Speaking at St Mary’s College Namagunga’s sports day, Dr Duncun Mugumya, the commissioner for physical education and sports, noted that many schools treat sports as an additional activity, but it is a legal requirement under the Ministry of Sports. (See Daily Monitor, July 18, 2024, ”Schools must prioritise sports in their budget-govt”)
Unfortunately, Mr Mugumya is right about most schools treating sports as an additional activity that can be done away with. This is quite evident from the infrastructure of most schools which have no sports facilities to boast of or no plan to outsource any such facilities.
Instead, learners are pumped with book knowledge from as early as 6:30am daily in the name of chasing grades to attract more parents to enroll their children in these schools and in turn make profits over high enrollment rates.
This creates a highly stressful but mostly sedentary lifestyle for learners who spend most of their time seated in traffic jams on the commute to and from school and in the classroom. For some, any spare time is spent seated in front of the television set.
Book knowledge is important but like Mr Mugumya points out, so is sports. As schools use the number of first grades their learners score as a selling point, the availability of functional sports facilities should also be a major selling point.
This now comes back to parents and guardians to prioritize sports as well. When the time comes to pick a school for the children, the availability of sports facilities should be one of the reasons why a school is chosen. It therefore takes joint effort from all stakeholders to ensure that sports activities are taken as seriously as they should.
According to the World Health Organisation, nearly one-third of adults worldwide, approximately 1.8 billion people, did not meet the recommended levels of physical activity in 2022. The findings point to a worrying trend of physical inactivity among adults, which increased by about 5 percentage points between 2010 and 2022.
Perhaps if adults embraced physical activity as an important part of their lives, then they would prioritise it for their children.
In the same vein, the government and other powers that be, apart from calling schools to order about the importance of physical activity should be seen to promote the preservation of free public spaces for physical activity not only for school children but for the rest of the youthful population.
Engaging in regular safe and supervised physical activity could save one a lot of pain and bills accrued from trying to treat lifestyle diseases and this is not to mention the numerous other benefits of prioritizing sports
