By Larissa Campos
In college, you are free.
You are free to go to bed at 3 a.m. You are free to eat ice cream for breakfast. You are free to get the puppy you’ve wanted since you were 12 years old, but your parents always said no to getting. The list of freedoms is endless.
So tell me, why are college students not free to participate in physical activity at their own discretion?
I was never someone who was too fond of gym class. It had nothing to do with athletic ability, but everything to do with being graded on my physical activity level. I couldn’t ever find reason in that.
School boards cite increasing obesity rates in children as the reason for required physical activity as part of an elementary education.
I can understand this.
The young and immature need a little bit of motivation to get off the couch and get moving. But I’m in college now. I can’t seem to fathom how colleges think it’s necessary to make the newly renamed Lifetime Fitness classes a requirement for degree programs.
When you reach college, you are thrown headfirst into independence. And with that independence, you develop the maturity to make personal decisions.
In college, we are trusted with the ability to make our own schedule, handle our own finances and make decisions that will influence the rest of our lives.
But we can’t decide when and how we want to work out? That makes no sense to me.
I am a few weeks shy of being done with my Lifetime Fitness credits at Baylor. And I can tell you from personal experience that I am not any more or less fit from having participated in Beginning Racquetball and Beginning Self Defense.
I mean no disrespect to my professors. The classes were well prepared and fulfilled their purpose as a human performance course. But in all honesty, the classes achieved nothing more than to threaten my GPA due to some close calls with excessive absences.
I admit that my choices of HP courses maybe weren’t the best, but when I looked through the list of classes I could take, ranging from Intro to Bowling to Beginning Ballet, I thought these were pretty decent picks. I will never understand how bowling is considered a fitness class.
If the point of these required classes is to get us moving around, they miss their mark completely.
I know I sound like a lazy, whining college student who wants to spend my free time napping, but that’s far from the truth.
I think most college students can agree with me when I say that said free time doesn’t really exist. In a stressful and busy time in our lives, I think we deserve the ability to decide when and even if we want to spend an hour every other day doing physical activity.
And if I choose to work out, I don’t think my workout of choice would be playing racquetball.
Again, I have no ill regards to the fine professors of the health and human performance department at Baylor University. I simply think that as an adult, I shouldn’t have to go to gym class anymore.
Larissa Campos is a senior journalism major from Centennial, Colo. She is a reporter for the Lariat.
