Importance of PE for Student’s Health and Personal Development

PE stands for Physical Education. It is a subject taught to students in schools and has been included in the curriculum of primary and secondary education around the globe. Physical education is known to promote psychomotor learning to teach the importance of physical health and fitness.

In PE, students are taught the importance of performing physical activity in their routine and how it affects their lifestyle and health.  PE classes are not just for exercises, they also include other activities such as sports, dance, and various other child development physical activities. Apart from these activities, knowledge about nutrition, healthy habits, and individual needs is imparted.

This is why a school with a playground can do wonders for a child’s overall growth and personality development because kids at a playground learn more life skills than in a closed classroom.

Here is an overview of the importance of physical education for students:

A] Physical Health Benefits

Physical education teaches students the significance of physical fitness and guides them in developing daily healthy habits like performing regular physical exercise for children and eating healthy food.

Students understand how physical fitness protects them from developing certain health conditions like obesity, heart disease, blood pressure, and diabetes, learning the answer to the question, why is physical health important? However, physical activity is not only good for your physical health but also affects your mental health to a greater extent.

• Physical activity helps to reduce or improve the capability to deal with mental conditions like depression, stress, and anxiety.
• Students get a chance to destress and detox their minds. This helps them deal with all the difficult situations in everyday life and in school.

In this way, PE promotes a healthy lifestyle among students and improves their academic performance, thus explaining the importance of PE for health.

B] Cognitive and Academic Habits

Taking a break is crucial for improving performance and avoiding monotony, no matter what activity you are engaged in. The same applies even to students. In fact, students need more breaks when they are highly focused on academics. This is where the importance of PE is recognized.

In the physical education class, students get a break from the monotony and are able to release excess energy that is causing them to get bored, get distracted with other activities, and not pay attention in class.

• After performing physical activity, your brain gets activated, and this helps students to be more focused in class and improve their memory and information-retaining power. In this way, the cognitive abilities of students improve.
• Also, absenteeism of students is avoided as physical activity keeps them fit and prevents any sickness.
• Thus, it has been noticed that students involved in physical activity have better academic performance, which improves their grades, and ultimately graduation rates are higher among them.

C] Social and Emotional benefits

With the help of health and personal development PE, students get a chance to socialise with their classmates and other schoolmates. Through this, they are exposed to learning social manners.

• In their physical education class, students interact with many other students and perform group activities, learning to cooperate with each other and work as a team.
• In such group activities, they get some sense of identity from their peers and also from the team.
• Eventually, students develop self-confidence that motivates them to learn and try new skills.
• In addition to learning social skills, students also learn to manage their emotions and mental conditions like stress and anxiety.
• In this competitive world, students are also under continuous pressure to perform best in their academics and get higher grades. But when they are exposed to physical activity, endorphins are released. This hormone makes you feel good by reducing your stress and anxiety.

D] Life Skills and Personal Development

With physical education, students learn important life skills necessary for their personal development education.

• Physical activity demands discipline because it is not easy for everyone to regularly perform physical activity. Some may ignore it out of laziness or any other circumstances. So to keep the journey going toward physical fitness, one needs to be self-disciplined.
• Another skill is setting goals and achieving them. Physical activities teach you to set goals and work in the direction to achieve them, and in life, without having a goal, you cannot achieve anything.
• Students also develop resilience. Performing a physical activity is not everyone’s cup of tea. In PE class, you are taught to fight all the obstacles and give your best to perform various child development physical activities.

Thus, PE class teaches students life skills like self-discipline, having a goal, being resilient, etc. All these life skills are ultimately important for one’s personal development. This gives a clear picture of the importance of PE for personal development.

Are you still questioning why is physical education important? Our guide, Top 8 life lessons children learn playing in playgrounds, sheds more light on what other life skills students can learn on the playground.

E] Challenges and solution

Despite so many benefits offered by physical education classes, schools face many challenges in implementing physical education classes.

Listed below are some of the challenges they may face:

• Lack of support from administrators or the school staff.
• PE programs may not be respected due to some bad experiences of a few.
• Some schools are still lagging in setting proper standards, outcomes, and curricula for PE.
• In some schools, teachers face problems in managing a large number of students due to a lack of enough staff.
• Sometimes difficulties also arise due to a lack of professional development among teachers.

The way forward to overcome the challenges of PE implementation are as follows:

• Administrators and school staff should be made aware of the importance of health and physical education programs.
• It is important to maintain transparency regarding the activities of the physical education (PE) program and to foster a positive attitude towards the program.
• Proper standards should be made, taking the help of some top organisations.
• Programs should be planned in such a way that a manageable number of students are allotted to each staff.

Conclusion 

Physical education should be an essential part of the academic curriculum, and awareness about the importance of physical education in school should be created. Physical education, along with giving physical fitness to protect one from various physical ailments, also provides benefits in other life aspects. It helps one to overcome mental conditions and supports personal development by teaching various important skills in life.

So if the students are exposed to PE in the school itself, they will develop the essential life skills which will help them in their personal and professional life.

Playgrounds are where a child’s true character is built. Playground for children is a fun learning space where they can learn practical life lessons like empathy, teamwork, competitiveness, discipline, fairness, equality, perseverance, and inclusion.

So, if you are interested in making changes to your school’s PE department and improving physical education for children in the UK, do not hesitate to reach out to us!