to think that an adult woman's physical fitness might have a lot to do with....

[HidingInTheHonsCupboard]

....what her periods were like as a teenager, and her gym teachers attitude towards them if they were awful?

Inspired by the thread where an employer asks whether a heavy period is a valid reason for being off work - and vivid recollections of regularly standing dizzy and humiliated in front of a class of giggling girls as the vile teacher exclaims loudly "you can't STILL be on your period, and if you are, light exercise will help --you faint again". shudder*

I was absolutely awful at sport when I was at school, I have dyspraxia, no coordination whatsoever and was always the last person to be picked for teams. There was no encouragement to find a sport that I might have been good at. I had very heavy periods with fainting and vomiting so was often off sick when it was my period. My PE teacher was also my head of year and she humiliated me by telling the whole class boys included that I had started my periods and was taking the piss. I was 12 at the time and I can still feel the utter fear and humiliation when she did this.

I don't know if the heavy periods had anything to do with my reluctance to try sports as I got older but my general crapness at PE did.

I think we had the same pe teacher scarlett. I was small, feeble, easily knocked over with poor co-ordination and skin the colour of milk.

Consequently I hated all school sports. Having to wear a tiny gym skirt, or worse, huge brushed cotton gym knickers the colour of dried blood put the tin lid on it.

Once she was teaching us volleyball and I kept mucking up the 'spike' so the ball shot off at all angles except over the net.

Mostly it landed where the boys were playing and I had to slink off to get it.

She accused me of flirting with them. They and their teacher actually laughed at the idea. Bastards, the lot of them.

Is PE taught any better nowadays? In my day PE teachers tended to be ignorant, thick oafs.

I cannot abide team sports, purely because of PE at school. However, I like going to the gym on my own, speaking to no one and trying to do better than last time.

why do hockey teachers wear fleeces and tracksuits and make you wear tiny skirts and aertex blouses?

It's not because you get warm running about. There was hardly any running about during my hockey lessons.

Just 20 minutes of shivering watching the two star pupils demonstrate bullying-off again and again followed by a brief burst of activity before a psycho in a gym skirt whacked me on the ankles with her stick and I fell in the mud.

Our gym teacher wore a duffle coat. We all had to wear gym shorts the same size of or knickers. I grew up in the highlands and it was usually sleeting.

My PE teacher was also fat and I do remember thinking that she would have benefited from taking said duffle coat off and having a run around herself instead of barking sarcastic orders at us.

I've always had heavy periods, never stopped me doing sport.
I hated pe at school as it was all gymnastics based.
I joined local athletics club and have run ever since, it is more tiring when I have my period, but has never stopped me.

I don't agree with your argument.

Another one put off sports by PE teachers.
In every other class from primary upwards we were put into groups of similar ability, generally encouraged to try, and the idea of shouting at pupils and humiliating them was nearly unheard of!
So why did almost all PE teachers get the best pupils to pick teams rather than doing it themselves, think it OK to shout abuse, calling anyone slow or uncoordinated 'lazy' or 'stupid' or usually in my case 'you bloody spazz', and generally just tell us to do stuff then shout if we couldn't, rather than actually teaching us how.
It was a revelation when the science teacher who also did PE in final year juniors explained how to bounce a ball and you have to actually push down with your hand, and make it go at the angle you want to get it back to straight again.

Periods not really an issue except that I loved swimming but not the shouty-abuse swimming lessons, so like everyone else made up wierd and wonderful cycles that only happened during lessons not free swims 4 other times a week!

Very grateful to the one imaginative PE teacher in fifth year who challenged all other staff to reduce skiving rates for PE, and thereby led to introduction of squash, orienteering, rugby and ballroom dancing, and I got very into orienteering (mix of brain and fitness needed, and no-one knows how well you did at the end so everyone gets cheered and only gets their result in the post!)

limitedperiodonly that sums up exactly my experience of games at school.

I agree with the OP although my issues weren't periods - I just wasn't a star pupil so was completely ignored or humiliated. My mum's gym teacher called her a battleaxe once (she was 8) and my mum still remembers it at 71 and has basically never done any exercise her whole life in large part because of the humiliation of school games.

I think it has an impact if you came to believe, as a teenager, that you'd faint if you exercised! I used to faint a lot, and for years I was worried to do sport because I thought I would faint.

I don't know how much I blame my gym teachers but it certainly didn't help that they didn't know anything about sport, fitness or biology (I mean really they didn't, they didn't have training), and so they had no idea what was sensible to recommend. I especially remember with joy the way the decided to punish half my class with extra running because we said we didn't think we could cycle to school instead of using buses/cars. I lived about 20 miles away!

I think diet is an issue too though - maybe girls are better taught now, but no-one thought to teach us that if you're having heavy periods, you probably want to think about what you need in your diet to combat the blood loss.

Oh, and doing games in a tiny, short, pleated skirt that fastened not with a kip or buttons but with a weird sort of clip that kept coming undone, that combined with periods could certainly put you off doing games!

Another games horror story. At my sister's school (formerly a boys school that went co-ed but hadn't thought through how to do it) they used to have to do the Kingston run which was a run along the towpath from where the school was in Teddington, through Kingston town centre and back along the other bank. The girls had to wear t shirts and gym knickers for running - this is what they made 13 year olds run through Kingston shopping centre in. It's like a scene from a nightmare - run through a shopping centre in your knickers. She was definitely traumatised by that.

Margot ! That's appalling. I would have simply quit school. I would seriously have rather been home-schooled

LOL.... although you haven't met my mother

My sister was quite honestly damaged by it. If she ever went to therapy it would be the first thing that came up!

I shall definitely be inspecting games pitches in winter before I choose a senior school for DD . I have no worries about current school - even though DS, when in Y4, scornfully informed me that even though they have tracksuit trousers, it was simply "not done" to actually wear them rather than doing rugby training in sub-zero conditions in shorts - I have already noticed that the girls (and maybe their teachers) are a lot more sensible and are generally tracksuited-up unless playing matches against other schools. They also have the same airtex shirt and shorts PE uniform as the boys for the summer so definitely no gym knickers.

We weren't allowed to do cross-country but the boys were expected to. Normally I'd complain about such blatant sex discrimination but I decided to let that one go.

Someone threw a magazine to me yesterday and I caught it perfectly, left-handed, slightly backhand. He was very impressed.

I didn't tell it was a fluke. I'm now worried I've used up my 'catching luck' on a bloody magazine. If anyone needs to throw her baby from a burning building she'd better not aim it at me

Some of the best teachers I had at school were PE teachers.

I used to deliberately piss about so I'd have to run extra laps and swim extra lengths! Couldn't get enough of sport as a teenager.

Can't be arsed now as am a lazy fuck, so I'm not sure there is a huge connection there. I have promised myself that I'll run a marathon before I'm 40 though and I definitely will or I'll regret it. I've got 7 years left!

Bloody hell, this gets worse and worse

It makes me so mad when I think what PE could be. Nocitrus, your PE teacher in the fifth year sounds the business. Like I said, I was lucky in that I was ok at sport - never spectacular, but solid enough, but because of the general encouragement and positive atmosphere in PE, I went to badminton after school and found my "thing" (plus the bloke that ran the club was hawtness)

There should have been so many more options available than the ubiquitous hockey, netball and cross country. And as for gym and "dance" Torture for a graceless oaf like me. (I knee'd myself in my own nose going over the box once - the blood was spectacular).

I think another problem is the idiotic beauty ethic in this country which is getting worse and worse. I look dreadful when I exercise - bright magenta, sweaty and freckly. Luckily I don't care, but teenage girls most definitely do.

I was just thinking I must have been lucky and had decent PE teachers when I was at school, then it occurred to me that I was on most of the school teams and was regularly used to do demonstrations, so actually I might have been one of those Alphas. If I was then I wholeheartedly apologise to any poor sod who had to stand around and shiver while i demonstrated racing turns in the pool If it helps any, doing 8 million head over heels turns in water that barely reaches your knees in the shallow end wasn't a barrel of laughs either.

I hated PE when I was at school, nothing to do with the teachers, I was just a lazy sod!! By 18 I was still a lazy sod and quite overweight!

I'm 40 now and love exercise, I exercise every day, look ten times better than I did when I was 20 so no, for me personally, my physical fitness is nothing to do with my gym teacher at school.

I'm pretty sure I've read of studies that reach exactly the same conclusion. So YANBU.

I think PE/games teachers' attitude and treatment of pupils has EVERYTHING to do with one's physical fitness as a grownup. Being yelled at whilst wearing ridiculous unsuitable outfits and freezing to death is not going to instil a love of physical activity.

I remember the PE teacher (who looked like Sean Bean; she was terrifying) shouting at me to "stop standing there like a lemon" during a very one-sided game of netball. Of course I'm standing here. All the good ones are on the other team and consequently at the other end of the court, while I'm stuck here as GS on the crap team and trapped in a semicircle!

Games in primary school were fun, we got to throw little coloured beanbags at each other and muck about with hula hoops; then the moment puberty kicks in we're expected to be co-ordinated and brilliant and blase about showering together and wearing pe knickers and tiny skirts when we're just getting the hang of the whole periods things, and if we're not we get humiliated and the idea that physical activity can be fun becomes anathema. And the government wonders why there's an obesity epidemic!

nope. not in my case.

I was a slim, fit teenager. I lkied PE and danced - with my PE teacher's daughetr so she like me .

Had hideous periods then which made me puke and collapse in pain - school just sent me home.

Now i'm a fat unfit old hippy who still has vile horrible periods.

Periods weren't a problem for me but the PE teacher (she was quite overweight when I think of it) just disliked me A LOT for no reason I could see.

I wasn't exactly brimming with self confidence and not a natural at sport but I did try at first. She always picked on me and it wrecked my confidence.

The worst thing I found was that we would just be expected to start a new sport and know exactly what to do. One day she set up a high jump and expected us to line up and jump it properly with absolutely no training or instruction whatsoever. It wan't like she was able to demonstrate. I flatly refused to do it. I was proved right when one girl injured her back quite badly.

Once I was 14 I just started skipping PE altogether. I never got into sport at all and am overweight and unfit now and it definitely started in school. By the time I got ti uni I was already unfit and a bit overweight so joining sports clubs seemed too daunting.

When I first started at secondary school we had the most vile PE skirts you ever saw, pale blue crimplene A-line wraparound things with a button (and big navy knickers underneath). They didn't suit anybody, not the sporty girls and definitely not a skinny, short, knock-kneed girl like me. Believe me we were thrilled when after a couple of years we got the little pleated navy ones with the flat fronts, like a mini kilt. We thought we were the bees knees!
We would probably have fainted with joy if we had track suits (like the PE teacher wore as we froze on the hockey pitch).

I hated PE because I was always getting injured. First year, smacked in mouth with tennis racket, much blood and pain and I genuinely thought my teeth were smashed but luckily they weren't. Second year, hit on the head with a rounders ball (proper hard one, not namby pamby tennis ball), I actually saw stars, Third year a basketball ricocheted off the hoop at high speed and hit me straight in the face, very painful when you wear specs... you get the picture!

I was DEFINITELY put off team sports and for a long time, exercise in general, by PE at school. PE lessons seemed to be where a lot of bullying happened, in the changing rooms, people making nasty comments about others' bodies, teachers making favourites of the people who played for school teams, people making fun of you for not being super-sporty. It definitely put me right off and I had no confidence about exercising. These days I go to the gym and run; still don't like the idea of classes or team sports though.