Fast track to getting kids back into shape

FEW POLITICIANS can afford to have any sense of humour these days, but when Jimmy Devins told the Dáil last week that we now have the fattest children in Europe, was I the only one who thought this was a sick joke?

We may have sent the country’s future wealth down a cruel and bottomless black hole. Are we actually about to send our future health down with it? You know the correlation, after all.

Not everybody will be comfortable with the idea of a politician telling the truth, but Devins, the Fianna Fáil TD for Sligo-North Leitrim, was being serious. Deadly serious, as childhood obesity is. It helps that he’s Dr Devins, and knows what he’s talking about, so when he told the recent Dáil debate on obesity that this was “a time bomb” that will “explode in all our faces” the national alarm bells should have been blaring.

Part of the problem is that they’re already worn out from blaring about the €82 billion we’re dumping into Nama. No wonder Fintan O’Toole is asking why anyone who has a choice would continue to live in Ireland. He’s not alone.

No wonder, too, that some people see childhood obesity as a minor problem, compared to our brutal national debt. Truth is our financial bankruptcy pales in comparison to our physical bankruptcy.

According to the most recent research, 38 per cent of Irish people are now overweight, with a further 23 per cent clinically obese. By my calculation that means nearly two-thirds of the population are either overweight or obese. That’s a lot of excess fat. The more sickening part is that one in five children is now considered overweight or obese; or to take another stat: 26 per cent of seven-year-old girls.

Writing in the health supplement of this newspaper on Tuesday, Fionola Meredith quoted David Kessler, the former head of the US Food and Drug Administration, as saying “we have made food into entertainment”, and that unquestionably is part of the problem. I’m no doctor, but I think the bigger problem is not our food habits; rather our exercise habits.

Dr Devins told the Dáil that walking and jogging would not cost the State anything, and “those who claim they cannot find the time, know well they can easily find it”. It is really that simple.

Yet childhood obesity is winning out relentlessly over normal childhood activity. We’re fast catching up with America, where within one generation, the number of overweight children aged 6-19 has tripled.

A good indication of why this is happening here was presented in Croke Park on Wednesday, at the launch of the Kellogg’s Field of Dreams Competition – a private sector initiative with a spin towards public health. According to the recent Kellogg’s survey, more than half of Irish parents (55 per cent) admit their children do not play any sport. About one third of parents said their child plays between one and two sports. Bottom line, 92 per cent of those surveyed believed that sports participation among Irish children should be higher.

But enough damn statistics. I met James Nolan up in Johnnie Fox’s last weekend, and although he’s retired from the sport for a year now, he looks every bit as skinny as ever. “Keeping fit” I said to him, and he said it back to me. Nolan twice ran the Olympic 1,500 metres, and was silver medallist in the European Indoors a decade ago, and, believe me, never got the credit he deserved.

Like all good athletes, fitness was something he was raised on, and likewise, Nolan used eat and drink what he liked.

Inevitably, the more serious he got about athletics the more serious he got about his diet. These habits stuck fast. I can never imagine Nolan being out of shape.

Few athletes I know ever let themselves go, because they’re programmed from a young age not to. Can you ever picture Sonia O’Sullivan or Catherina McKiernan being fat?

By cosmic coincidence, Nolan is now putting his lifetime appreciation of fitness back into Irish sport, in a small but hugely purposeful way.

Two years ago, he was talking with a former club-mate in his native Offaly, Eamonn Henry, head of the Offaly Sports Partnership. They wondered why kids these days weren’t as active anymore, and reckoned that for many children the fun had gone out of sport. It had gone too competitive.

They looked at some models in other countries, and based largely on the Sports Hall Athletics in Britain, came up with Fast Kids – a simple yet highly effective way of engaging primary school children with sport.

“Not every kid is going to be good at running,” Nolan told me, “but when you also have throwing, jumping, balancing, the use of a ball, they’ll find they’re good at something. We have 10 different activities with Fast Kids, and automatically there is 10 times greater chance the kid is going to enjoy what they’re doing. It’s also team based, in that when we go into a class of 30 kids, there is something for all 30 kids.

“So we have 10 activity stations, three kids at each station. They’re not standing around waiting for five minutes to move on to the next station. It’s practically non-stop, for 50 minutes. They’ve been physically active for those 50 minutes, without realising it. And it gives them all a sense of achievement, whether it’s the standing long jump, or throwing the medicine ball.

“Because there is so much variety in the programme, there’s much more of a chance the kid will drift towards something they enjoy, and therefore more inclined to participate in sport in the long-term. It works. And they enjoy it. All that can only help lower obesity levels in children.”

Fast Kids has specifically designed targets (the Fast stands for “fun, agility, speed and technique”) and the end product is a kid comfortable with the basic skills for any sport (See www.fastkids.ie). When Nolan and Henry piloted the programme in 2008, testing in 18 schools across Offaly, 80 per cent of the 727 kids fell into the bottom range of fundamental motor and fitness skills.

When they re-tested a class in Daingean earlier this year, after the kids had undergone just 12 one-hour-a-week sessions, 80 per cent of the kids had improved to the medium to high range. They’ve now introduced Fast Kids to 30 schools in Offaly since formally beginning last September.

“At the start they were knocking stuff, dreadful co-ordination,” said Nolan, who has a BSc in Sports Management from UCD. “You’d throw a ball at a kid, and the ball would hit them before the hand would come out to catch it. That’s how slow they were.

“Because I’m linked to this, people think this is just athletics, but it applies to all sports. Soccer, basketball, swimming, GAA. With this the kids can get better at any sport, and you see for yourself the huge improvement that is made.”

It really is that simple. But don’t take my word for it. Go along to this weekend’s Athletics Ireland Juvenile Indoor Championships (staged in that desperately out-dated facility in Nenagh) and see how many obese children you can find. Not one, I expect, but rather plenty of actively skinny kids developing their own appreciation of fitness.

Small steps. Fast kids. They shouldn’t be the exception but the rule. Our health will always be our wealth, and that’s no lie.