Canada Fitness Awards

 

In practice, we all thought the program silly and perhaps mean-spirited, for it seemed to rate natural abilities more than anything else. And, heck, we couldn’t do anything about that. Not quite eugenics. But not as far off as I’d like, either.

Every Canadian student who went to school in the 70s or 80s remembers the Canada Fitness Tests. They were the yearly chance we all had to go for the big time by competing against each other in an individual test of our own fitness. We practiced for weeks before the test in class and outside of it to maximize our effort. I myself went from a Bronze to a Silver and then to Gold in three years of Jr High. That's when we were all fit, skinny boys. No matter how bad you did, everyone at least got a pin for participating. Some reward for your effort but to us the 'PIN' was death. Everyone knew you got the pin. The only thing worse than getting the pin was getting a bronze patch. It instantly marked you as weak and inferior by your peers. Then again, anyone who got to Award of Excellence standards was a GOD. I have only seen two kids get that in my lifetime.

It was always that damned flex arm hang that meant the different for most in shape teens between gold and the AWARD OF EXCELLENCE. I mean just look at that beauty. You could sew that into your school jacket and wear it proudly because everyone knew what it meant.

The fitness test consisted of six short duration events for 7- to 18-year-old individuals: the 50 yard run, the 300 yard run, flexed arm hangs, the shuttle run, speed situps, and the standing long jump.^[7] It was based on the fitness performance tests developed by the Canadian Association for Health, Physical Education and Recreation (CAHPER; now Physical and Health Education Canada) from a fitness study conducted in 1965.

I would like to see someone studying fitness for their PHD do a study of how the kids who participated did as compared to groups of students today. I wonder if we were any more fit due to our more active lifestyle. I mean the only sedentary things you could do in the house as a kid was watch TV or read a book. Once that became boring you HAD to go outside and play for your own sanity. If we had video games and computers to retreat to, we would have never gotten the exercise that we did.