Surprising news: three in 10 50- to 65-year-olds in a recent Age UK survey said school sports memories had put them off exercise “for life”. Only three in 10? When it comes to exercise, there are surely two kinds of people – the handful who enjoyed school PE lessons and everyone else.
I’m guessing the first category are out smashing their marathon PBs, meaning we indoor sorts can safely share war stories. Mine: forced to walk half an hour to the sports field in the tiny synthetic pleated skirt that was mysteriously designated mandatory sportswear, heckled by local perverts and youths shouting “jolly hockey sticks”, then skulking, motionless, in the mud, avoiding various projectiles while being shouted at by the sporty girls and contemplated with bafflement by (mostly benign) PE teachers.
Many people have similar memories. A German study in 2024 identified two overarching categories of “unsettling” PE experience: “vulnerability of the students perceived through revealed inadequacies” and “social oppression of the supposedly ‘lazy, weak and unfit’”. Some of us got both.
These experiences can shape lifelong beliefs around physical activity: it’s something you can be “bad” at; it’s for other people; it means weird outfits and unwelcome attention. Post-school, lots of exercise messaging is still unhelpful: influencers with improbable physiques tell people they’re doing everything wrong; studios sell an aesthetic that seems to demand you look a certain way. When Nike recently put up a giant, shouty sign at Peckham parkrun that read: “You didn’t come all this way for a walk in the park,” I bet many more tentative participants felt as if they were being shouted at by a whistle-toting PE teacher on a cross-country run.
I’ve had a very recent revelation that exercise makes me feel better, not worse; I wish I’d known sooner. If my school PE teacher had said: “Moving your body will make you feel joyfully alive and present, like a happy dog,” would I have been inspired to commit to a lifelong movement practice? No, I would have been disgusted and scornful, but warmer clothes and fewer ball-based team sports might have helped.
Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist