Strength and Conditioning - or Health and Fitness?

Strength and conditioning coaches are rapidly becoming the latest must-have accessory for school sport.  Their impact is evident.  Emulating the elite game, players are getting bigger, stronger and faster.  Schools without this specialist resource are deeply conscious of a shortcoming, and mobilising a campaign to redress the omission. 

Athletic conditioning is, however, the fairy on the top of the tree.  The bigger issue - the tree itself - is the culture of health and fitness within a school.  This is where the biggest gain is possible, though it is less public.  Its impact might go far beyond bigger, stronger players in marquee teams, into the fabric of the community itself.

The legitimate role of a conditioning coach is to improve the understanding of the benefit of elevated fitness levels, and provide pupils with an environment which enables them to embrace this.  It will  equip them with the technical skills to do so, the support to maintain commitment to medium term goals and a culture which recognises and values physical fitness for its own sake.

This requires a subtle shift of thinking.  It would value functional fitness for its impact on health, learning and physical capacity.  For some pupils this would extend into conditioning for high performance.  But the real aim would be to impact on all members of the community- including staff and parents. 

What would have to happen for this to be achieved? 

The first thing would be to move fitness from the murky margins of the school, the forbidding facility  where the school's premier athletes proudly parade.  To make the bigger message visible everywhere.  Central to the mission of the organisation.  Improved fitness has lifelong benefits for everyone.  Clear explanation of how fitness improves learning and concentration at a cellular level.  That exercise improves exam scores, as well as life quality, susceptibility to disease - even lifetime income expectations.  The science is emphatic, though sadly invisible to many impressionable children.

Additionally, it is important to separate fitness from competition.  The great majority of adults never compete. And when they do, it is usually against themselves.  Conditioning may improve athletic performance and contribute to the winning of school matches.  It may look great on the beach.  But these are minority, and cosmetic impacts.  Sport may not be for all, but health and fitness can be.

So, maybe the time has come to change the title and widen the role.  The Strength and Conditioning Coach could be given a wider brief, and bigger profile.  To impact positively on the entire community.  Encourage activity.  Increase awareness of the benefits of exercise, and the programmes which achieve these.  Gently encourage the least inclined.  Challenge the athletes.  Measure the progress and raise the profile.  A wider range of activities might inspire a correspondingly increased  population of participants.  Including staff and parents.  As well as supporting the aspiring athletes.

Just as Maths seeks to provide for everyone from the Oxbridge entrants to the remedial, exercise can have the same width of impact.  But only if a school aspires to do that.

The title is off putting.  It reeks of elitism and high performance.  Which is great for a minority: the high performing elite.  But if health and fitness is going to have greater significance, it needs to be re-packaged.  With new, additional and wider reaching success criteria.  Simply to increase awareness and raise levels of health and fitness across the community. 

A new generation of appointment.  The Head of Health and Fitness.