What is Yoga in Physical Education?
Healthful Vitality | 12/01/2021 | By NP Contributor | What is Yoga in Physical Education?
Why We Need Yoga in Physical Education?
In the past 20 years, childhood obesity has become doubled in children and tripled in adolescents. It means that above one-third of the U.S. youth is obese or overweight. Childhood obesity has become an epidemic that comes with serious consequences, both in the long and short term, such as high cholesterol, high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and stroke.
The issue is urgent, which needs to be addressed on an emergency basis, in order to provide a healthier future for our children and youth. Of course, physical activity and good nutrition are pillars for the weight maintenance and healthy development of children and teens. And being that children and teens spend almost 7 hours, on average, of their time at educational institutes, it is believed that these institutes have more power to create positive health impacts. Particularly, through the inclusion of yoga and exercise in their physical education.
Yoga as a Part of PE
As an effort to get our children and youth healthy, yoga offers a great option of modifying the standard Physical Education (PE) curriculum to be more enriched and relevant for students of any age. Yoga not only improves physical fitness, such as bone strength, flexibility, and muscle strength, but it does so in such a way that is accessible, developmentally suitable, and non-competitive for children and teens.
Yoga PE Project and Essential Life Skills
The yoga physical Education project actually moves beyond the classical model of physical education to increase self-management, self-awareness, and self-efficacy. It also helps children and teens to develop essential life skills in a way that sports may not. In short, yoga physical education project helps students establish essential tools that empower them to observe their needs and take charge of their own health.
Thinking Above & Beyond the Traditional Curriculum
Yoga does not just get students’ bodies moving. Indeed, it fulfils their physical needs that a classical physical education curriculum usually does not. For instance, in many team sports, the physical activities typically don’t focus on a child’s individual development, sense of space and balance, and coordinated behaviors. While children may learn certain specific skill sets like throwing or kicking, they don’t learn an improved sense of holistic body awareness. In fact, yoga provides them that control and decision-making skills.
Through modified Yoga education lesson plans, children and teens is provided proper time to be introspective and be quiet within their bodies, while at the same time being challenged to ask questions. This will enable them to take more ownership of their feelings, actions, and thoughts. In the end, this means that children and teens are not just healthier, but more focused to face challenging tasks with more resilience and confidence.
Final Thoughts
In light of all these benefits, it is evident that integrating yoga into physical education should focus on meeting the needs of every individual where he or she is are, without any expectation and any judgment. Incorporating yoga into the physical education curriculum is the need of the time for the National Standards for Physical Education and Health, in the United States. Yoga simply offers a fresh and modified way on how children and teens can improve their fitness via exercising in a new way.
(Related Article: The Evolution in Education)