Unlearning PE
What you don't know can hurt you


WRITTEN BY MOLLY MARTIN
"I need some salt tablets," the girl said. She was 12, maybe 13, one of dozens of players at a summer basketball camp at Lakeside School. We coaches tried to explain to her that even when sweating a lot, most people don't need more salt. That we get plenty of sodium in our normal diets. That taking salt tablets was not only passé', it was potentially unhealthy. "But my father is a doctor, and he says I should take salt tablets." Oh.

Many things taught in physical-education classes 50, 30, even 10 years ago don't hold up today. Few may know this better than Alice Lockridge. Lockridge was a physical-education teacher who went back to school in 1976 - when the PE levy failed in the state Senate. She earned a master's degree in adult fitness from the UW. And did some serious reflecting.

"I realized I had taught physical education without ever using what I knew about anatomy," Lockridge says. "I'd been teaching wrong. I was disgusted, scared and fearful. I couldn't go back to those junior-high students and tell them they shouldn't have been bouncing up and down."

Lockridge found another way to reach her old students, and many more: by teaching teachers. She's accredited by the American Council on Exercise as a trainer for fitness instructors, one of only 18 in the world. Classes and seminars are run through her Renton company, Pro-Fit (255-3817).

Some people know Lockridge best as "the aerobics police." It's not unusual for her to interrupt a stranger in mid-exercise. Flash her "special-agent" badge. Explain - often with a bit of humor - how to make the movement safer and more effective.

One Lockridge workshop reviews her list of 30 "outlawed exercises." Many people - teachers included - are surprised that movements they perform regularly could be doing them more harm than good.

Sometimes it takes a simple adjustment to make an exercise safer. For example:

"I've heard of two people dying in exercise classes doing this, and another who had a stroke and is paralyzed," she said. "AU in this state. "The neck wasn't made to carry the weight from my rear. Now, some people say they're very flexible and they're used to doing it. But those three people were, too, until that last time."

Lockridge emphasizes that not all harmful exercises cause pain. "If I'm stretching my knee ligaments, I may not feel it, but I know I'm hurting my knee.

"Coaches tell me, 'I've been doing this all my life,' but it may be hurting the kids they teach."

With sit-ups, Lockridge watches for a whole list of pitfalls: having the feet held, keeping the legs straight, thinking sit-ups will get rid of the fat on the stomach, trying to work the "lower abs," counting how many one can do in a minute. "Who cares who has the fastest abdominals?" Instead she likes to measure how long one can do sit-ups "That's what you want in abdominals: endurance. I want to be able to hold in my stomach and walk all the way across the restaurant."

Comments like that help make Lockridge such an endearing aerobics cop. "After all," she said, "it's just your abdominals, it's not world peace."

Molly Martin is assistant editor of Pacific.
Seattle Times/Seattle Post-Intelligencer
MARCH 7, 1993