Time on my hands

I have two hobbies which take up most of my free time. One of them is training my dogs and going on walks with them, the other is group fitness classes. I know some people would describe taking their dogs out for walks as a household chore rather than a hobby, but I figure that if I spend two to three hours per day doing something, I can call it my hobby. When I’m walking with them on a frozen lake in the winter or on one of the near-by beaches in the summer, it’s the best, but I don’t mind the rainy and muddy conditions too much either.

We do training almost every day as well, because I think that that is the best way to get a dog to learn something, through repetition. We do mainly obedience training, but about once a week we are also involved in the local rescue-dog activity. My younger dog has been trained to look for people both in the woods and in the ruins of a collapsed house.

I started group fitness classes about a year ago. During the summer when I had lots more free time, I used to go on the classes pretty much every day. This resulted in me being in the best condition ever in the autumn and I’m planning to repeat this in the following summer. I’ve never been much of an athlete, but there’s just something in group fitness classes that makes me want to do my best and this of course shows in the results. I’m thinking maybe it’s the instructor in the front, who’s telling you not to stop before the song ends or the people around you who are also in pain and sweating. But so much has to be mentioned that I can’t stand zumba.

If I were a PE teacher, I would...

I think that the biggest problem in PE at school is that there’s too little of it for it to really have a positive influence on anyone’s health. An hour per week won’t make you fitter, especially when in PE classes half of the time is spent learning the rules of some game instead of actually playing it. 

So my solution to this problem would be to spend much less time on the theory and just try to get the game going as quickly as possible. Of course some time must be spent on the basic techniques to prevent any possible injuries, but this depends completely on the sport. We all know how to run, but playing volleyball without spraining our wrists might prove a bit harder. With a small, compact theory session in the beginning, the rest of the time could be spent on the actual exercising and the benefits of the PE lessons could be multiplied.

Another way to make PE lessons more useful for the students could be that all of the traditional sports would be put aside and the lessons would be spent doing different kinds of relaxation exercises. These exercises could be anything from yoga to walking in the fresh air, as long as they would have a stress and tension releasing effect. Especially here in Finland where during winter almost all of our free time is spent in the dark, it wouldn’t do any harm to re-energize ourselves during the school day. This would most likely improve concentration on the lessons, so the teachers of other subjects would be happy as well.