iNVOLVEMENT IN SPORRTS

Pro would have us believe that people who engage in sports are healthier than those who don't! This is a myth. Any person who eats a well balanced diet, exercises regularly, and doesn't engage in unhealthy practices such as abusing substances to a point that they are harmful to the body, will be just as healthy or healthier than a person who engages in sports. Just because the University of Arkansas claims something doesn't make it true. Sports stars are not healthy because of playing sports alone, but rather, they have to follow a certain diet according to the sport they play, and avoid unhealthy practices etc. It's a combination of factors that makes one healthy, and we can have a combination that includes no sports. Take for example moderate alcohol use versus basketball: (1) A Harvard study found the risk of death from all causes to be 21 – 28 % lower among men who drank alcohol moderately compared to abstainers. Can Pro show me one medical study where playing basketball or any other sport reduced the risk of death from all causes to the same or greater degree? (Camargo, C.A. et al. Prospective study of moderate alcohol consumption and mortality in US male physicians. Archives of Internal Medicine, 1997, pp. 157, 79-85) So we need not play sports to achieve good health, nor are sports people more healthy than other people who live healthy lives without sports. The fact is one can stay totally healthy without any sports (swimming, racing, cricket). And actually, the classical idea of sport is a competition, an ambition for more fitness or muscular body.We definitely need some motion. However the medically needed movement dose is easily reached by some daily activities: 187 min dish-washing or 172 min caring shopping bags home burns same amount of calories as 43 min of intensive swim training. We do not really need much to keep us fit! The famous College Alumni Health Study (1960) says any kind of motion is good, as soon as our pulse speeds up and the breath gets deeper. In a recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, Slentz (physiologist at Duke University medical center) and his colleagues looked at whether cardiovascular exercise could increase cholesterol: Simply jogging 20 miles a week elevates the larger HDL by 19 percent. Many other studies show that even a little motion is already quite significant for the human body and there is no need to exaggerate. And some more facts: • even soft swimming has impact on knee joint and intervertibral discs • regular swimming escalates the Asthma risk to 50% – almost same for running and skiing • the lungs of children that regularly swim are similarly damaged as smoker-lungs • more than 45 min sport in a week increases miscarriage chances by pregnant women in the first 17 weeks The point I wanted to make here is that in the case of fitness and sport we should really have a clear head and listen to the feedback of our body. Can competitive sports be unhealthy? First there is the possibility of physical injury in a sport. Some sports injuries can be repeated with disastrous results. People have become permanently disabled or have even died as a result of injuries received in a competitive sport. And I'm not talking about race car driving. I'm talking about boxing, football, and a ton of other sports. Competitive sports YOU probably participate in. There is also the possibility of psychological difficulty stemming from obsession with or over-commitment in competitive sports. We've seen that theme countless times on television and at the movies, haven't we? Competitive sports pose a risk to our physical and mental health in many ways. Pro argues that playing sports teaches us respect, teamwork, discipline, and perseverance; as if those same qualities cannot be learnt apart from joining a sports team. No one in my family has been involved in sports, and yet we know about team work cause we all go to work and have to work well even with people we don't like, and we still get the job done well. Does not playing sports make you undisciplined? Will Pro try to tell us that all people who don't play sports are not disciplined for this very reason? None of these qualities are really taught by the sports themselves, but are brought into the sport by the players. No sport teaches you perseverance. This is something you choose to do, or not to do (and drop out of the team) because of your own personal background. Pro has not proved that sports teaches ethics or morality. Many players on many teams in many different sports are very unethical, and do not have team spirit at all despite being in sports for many years. Many of them don't care about the team, but about showing off how good they are; and it is only their ability to make scores that their coaches bare with their prideful spirit. Anyone reading this debate knows in their heart of hearts this is the truth. So I don't think Pro has made a good case for sports. Many children get a proper parenting that helps them develop all the respect, teamwork, discipline, and perseverance they need without every joining a team for sports. Maybe music will be their thing, or medicine; it doesn't make them unhealthy of unethical. I look forward to Pro's rebuttal.