P.E was hell until 35
Today I did the last P.E with Joe workout.
(for those who don’t know fitness coach Joe Wicks ran a ‘P.E with Joe’ session for kids and families 3–5 days a week once the UK went into Lockdown it’s a HIIT workout, but designed so the whole family can do it, infused with fun and silliness like costumes and games).
This lockdown is the only time in my life I have voluntarily done P.E. I’ve not been unsporty — the contrary in some ways, as a young kid I loved to swim and could spend hours and hours doing that. Later, I rode horses, ironically I was probably fitter and stronger than half the kids in school from riding and all the yard work. Then from age 17, I went to the gym. I can run a half marathon. Yet the legacy of PE is still that I consider myself ‘fat’ and ‘not sporty’.
I wrote a tweet praising Joe Wicks, for making PE something everyone could enjoy- and countering those of us who had a terrible experience. And the response it got shows that I’m not the only one who felt this way.
If you were the girl or boy that was good at PE not a lot of this will make sense to you. You’ll find it really hard to understand. But try and listen. Because for the rest of us PE was a living hell.
PE was school-sanctioned bullying. By teachers and students for lots of us. It was teachers shouting at us for something that was just beyond our natural ability. And it was an excuse for the bullies to be let loose on the vulnerable kids. How many of us were ‘accidentally’ hit by a ball/bat/fist during PE? How many of us were called worse names than usual during it?
PE wasn’t about health or exercise, it was about outdated notions of competitive sport and ranking us, often shaming us too. Competitive sport is great, for those who want to compete. It teaches great skills, both on and off whatever pitch you’re on. It’s a great outlet for many kids. It shouldn’t be a chance to bully, and it shouldn’t be something you’re graded on. Not everyone has the aptitude for Rugby in the same way not everyone can play a violin. PE, in the sense of promoting healthy lives should be about that- health, not competing for the sake of competing.
And I know resources are stretched. But a better attitude from a teacher costs nothing. And maybe (hopefully) things have massively changed by now. But the attitude of ‘but why can’t you hit a ball?’ or ‘fat kids can’t do trampolining’ (spoiler we can) left lots of us with scars that we carry to this day. It made it so lots of us still to this day don’t enjoy sport.
Can you imagine the worst things you think about yourself- fat, lazy, useless, actually being given time on the curriculum twice a week? Or basically having scheduled time for your bullies to go at you? That’s what PE felt like for most of us. And I do lay that at the feet of the teachers we had, they needed to do better. They also needed to be trained better, but also lots of them needed to understand that not every child has a natural aptitude for sport…in the same way they don’t for maths or history or music. We all have our gifts, we aren’t broken if sport isn’t one of them. But we should still be allowed to, and enabled to enjoy exercise.
It’s something that still impacts me to this day. I’ve turned down Birthday Party and Hen Party invites that involve dance classes because I cannot face the thought of being laughed at by a group of girls again when I can’t do it. The only group exercise class I’ve ever done is Yoga (and I only stayed because my teacher was a glorious kind man who I know won’t mind me saying didn’t look like a typical Yoga teacher and understood short legs don’t bend that way). I took up running, but I don’t share my times with anything. And with apologies to any of them who read this, the girls in my choir who compare exercise regimes often (unintentionally) make me feel like the fat kid in PE class again. I don’t want to feel that way about kind, lovely women I’m friends with, but that’s how deep this stuff goes.
At 17 I found the gym. But scared of the years of PE shame I stuck with a variation on the same routines for about 10 years. Only in recent years with online fitness instructors was I able to teach myself new gym routines without having to have contact with another human.
It wasn’t just PE that messed with my relationship to food and exercise of course. The wider world’s obsession with the size of women’s bodies is of course also to blame. But imagine if instead of a netball coach barking at us to run faster in our gym knickers, who didn’t care that someone threw a ball at you, told you that you’d ‘never make an athlete’ or 101 other micro aggressions, instead took the approach of ‘find the fun in exercise’. Imagine instead of who gets picked last for netball, it was ‘how can exercise help you mentally’.
I can’t tell you how it felt to be too big for the Netball vests at age 12. Or the feeling of total shame getting changed for PE. Being too fat for it all. Add to that the shame of not having the cool trainers. Not being on any school teams (Netball teams in British schools are the Cheerleaders, bitchy swishy ponytails included)
If I’d liked PE, if I’d found a form of exercise I could do, that I was encouraged in, would I maybe have escaped years of obsessive exercise in my bedroom where nobody could see me? I remember vividly where it started. Christmas Day, I felt ‘fat’ and spent an age doing sit ups to ‘punish’ myself and burn some calories. After that I’d lock myself away in my room and exercise to burn calories. I ate less and less. When I was 17 my periods stopped. But being naturally not-thin I never ‘looked ill enough’ for anyone to worry. I discovered the gym and sticking to the same fixed routine so nobody could say I was doing it wrong, did that over and over. Strictly 5 days a week at least. Feeling guilty about taking a day off. Exercise to tick off a box, earn the food and balance it out. That’s what culture- and P.E had made me think, if you’re not good at it, you’re fat, so exercise to punish yourself. (but you’re still crap at it)
‘you’ve lost weight’ or ‘you’ve put on weight’ feel like they’re the only markers of achievement for a formally fat kid. Especially still living in the City you grew up in, likely to see people you went to school with or worse, their parents. No matter how much you achieve ‘oh she’s lost a lot of weight’ is still the gold standard of compliment. You don’t want its twin ‘she’s put on weight’
And no matter how many body-positive accounts I follow on Instagram it’s hard to shake. It’s hard to shake the notion that going up a size is a failure. It follows you. It never leaves. Every time I’ve worked in an office obsessed with diet culture it creeps in. The dread, the fear of judgment- they think I’m eating too much, they know I’m not exercising enough. And I know any time my mental health is slipping it goes immediately towards food an exercise.
It’s not all PE. But man was that the root of lots of this evil. If PE teachers were focused more on healthy bodies and crucially healthy minds, on how exercise makes us feel, they might stand a hope of countering all the other negativity.
That’s why I loved Joe Wick’s ‘P.E with Joe’ for me it felt like a revelation, what P.E could have been like. The super-simple mantra of exercise being about how you FEEL not what you look like doing it, not who is the best, was at 35, a revelation.
I have thankfully mostly adjusted my own attitudes, mostly in control of exercise being something I enjoy not, something that’s a punishment. But I was never able to step into an exercise class.
I cried in frustration many times in the last few months doing Joe Wicks workouts. My lack of coordination and a lifetime of being told it’s ‘bad’ not to be good at sports. But last week something almost magical happened, I feel flat on my face trying to do a move (not unusual) and I laughed.
It felt like a breakthrough. Not to be dramatic, but it felt huge. It felt like finally stepping away from all of that nonsense PE had given me. I’m not ready to step into a Gym class of glossy fit women yet, but I now know it’s not a disaster to be a bit rubbish at whatever you try. I’ve found a new love of different exercises that I never thought I would.
I was 35 when that happened. Just imagine if I’d been 5 what a difference that would have made.
