Heart monitors help Argenta-Oreana students track their own fitness goals – Herald & Review

At Argenta-Oreana Middle School, physical education class is 40 minutes a day and some of that time is spent changing, warming up and cooling down, so teacher Abby Schoolman estimates the students get only about 20 minutes of actual exercise at school, which means the rest is up to them to do on their own.

To help train the kids to monitor their own fitness level and exertion, she applied to the Illinois Association for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance (IAHPERD) for a grant to buy heart monitors for the students to use during PE class.

“I had been teaching elementary PE so I was kind of excited to come to the middle school and try out some of the theories I’d learned,” Schoolman said.

She and co-teacher Kaleb Renfro wanted to get 40 heart monitors and an iPad so the students could track their heart rates in real time. The grant covered about two-thirds of the cost and the district covered the rest, she said.

“We wanted enough for our biggest class, so every kid in the class can have one,” she said.

The zones are color-coded for easy identification and kids can see if they’re working hard enough to get the most benefit from the workout and the most useful thing about it, she said, is that kids are striving for their own best level instead of being compared to each other. For example, the athletes who compete on the school’s teams have a different level of fitness than the more sedentary kids, and it takes much more work for them to reach a higher heart rate. One student, Schoolman said, can reach his optimum heart rate and get the most cardiovascular benefit doing fewer laps than, for example, a basketball player, yet that student always felt he wasn’t keeping up with the other kids. With the heart monitors, he can see that he’s working just as hard.

“Any time they’re in Zone 3, 4 or 5, they’re accumulating minutes (toward their goal) and making themselves heart-healthier,” Schoolman said.

The goal isn’t to reach the maximum heart rate, which is what the kids thought at first, Renfro said. Staying in that top zone too long can actually be harmful. What they want is healthy exertion to strengthen their hearts and increase their endurance.

Schoolchildren used to take the annual Presidential Fitness Test which experts now liken to military training exercises rather than overall fitness in children. Kids in middle and high school were expected to do 40 push-ups, 10 pull-ups, a mile run in 6:30 and other benchmarks that were intimidating even for active kids.

That test was discontinued in the 2012-13 academic year and the goal is for kids to improve their own individual fitness. The Presidential Youth Fitness Program is more about assessing children’s health and is confidential among student, parents and teacher. It measures aerobic capacity, body composition, flexibility, muscle strength and endurance and gives the teacher and student the tools to improve fitness.

At Argenta-Oreana, for example, the students look at their results and create goals to improve their fitness, and work on those goals with their teachers’ help.

“When I’m in a different zone, it tells me whether to slow down or keep pushing myself,” said Carter Logue, 12, a sixth-grade basketball player. Now that the basketball season is over, he said, he’ll be starting track season and knowing how his body feels at maximum performance will be a help.

“You get a lot of information about your heart and how you can increase your endurance and your balance and get stronger, and gives you information about how healthy or not healthy you are,” said 11-year-old Sarai Roman. “When you’re doing exercise, and you’re sweating, it’s like a sign that lets your heart monitor know how your heart is getting more energy.”

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