SUSIE BEEVER Feeling inadequate at school is putting us off sport for life T

HIS article is dedicated to all of those who failed the popularity contest at school.

That is, anyone who, at some point, was picked last in rounders, couldn’t care less about making the cross country team or who sadly never graced the ‘gifted and talented at sports’ board of honour. The rest of you can run along. Go on now, shoo.

I’m going to pitch an idea that’s a little out there, but something I’ve always believed: Elitism in school sports has contributed to a crisis of inertia and inactivity in young adults.

A quarter of us in the UK are completely inactive, NHS findings claim. Meanwhile physical inactivity cost the world £52bn in 2013, according to a study by researchers at the University of Sydney. In the words of Carrie Bradshaw, I couldn’t help but wonder whether this is partly due to a worldwide loathing for sports following negative early experiences formed in school.

I’m not denying there are myriad reasons why laziness has soared over the past few decades; more cars, access to public transport and the increasingly exorbitant costs of gym memberships. Oh, and Netflix.

But there is a deeper-rooted reason why more of us eschew regular activity for being a couch potato.

Part of our reluctance to get on a pair of running shoes stems from associations made in our school years between exercise and feeling inadequate, humiliated or just full of complete disdain from running around a waterlogged football pitch in sub-zero temperatures. Unless schools have completely reformed PE classes in the decade since I left, children are pitched against one another in a way that made you loathe Wednesday afternoons if you weren’t naturally gifted at sport. Exercise was another means of proving you were better than others – and I have no qualms about this. Competition is healthy and important for pushing yourself. If you’re that way inclined. But not everyone is. And the truth is there are some children who would benefit more from competing with themselves rather than others. Gyms are basically an adult version of PE class: Hotbeds of muscular ninnies parading around clutching protein shakes and thinking they’re some sort of Adonis while the rest of us mess around on the treadmill just trying to burn off last night’s Domino’s. It’s no wonder it feels like such a tedious task. Schools should be able to teach children individually to find ways of enjoying exercise and to do it for themselves, and not as a way of proving something to others. Note, this is not a criticism of teachers who do an extremely undervalued job, more of the lack of necessary funding to get the best out of young people. Everyone has the ability to enjoy exercise because, and I hate to use a cliché, there literally is something for everyone.