C-Force: Fine-Tuning to Find the Moving Health Benefits of Sports

While striving for excellence in sports may be an obvious goal of the Olympic Games, a less heralded one is promoting the health benefits of sport. This goal is as important in the host country, France, as it is in other parts of the world. As the International Olympic Committee's website proclaims, "in France almost 40% of the population deny themselves these benefits." One in two adults in France say "they do not do physical activity of any kind." An "increasingly sedentary lifestyle" is also common among teenagers in France, as "40% of young children spend more than three hours a day sitting in front of a screen." This is why it is important that a dedicated effort is made to ensure that we look at sports as participants as well as spectators, and to reap the benefits participation provides. This mandate certainly applies to Americans as well.

A recent report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention proclaims that today nearly 25% of adults in this country are considered inactive. According to statistics from the American Heart Association, only one in four high school students get the recommended hour a day of physical activity.

According to the Summer Olympics website, a trial program now underway -- "developed in partnership with the French Ministry of National Education and co-financed by the French National Sports Agency" -- is a "30 minutes of exercise every day" initiative designed to give collective exercise "a principal place in children's daily lives" and help children "develop their self-confidence and build core values that are useful throughout their lives, such as respect, team spirit, fairness, high standards and perseverance."

I must admit that this effort reminds me of the Kickstart Kids program I began at select Houston middle schools beginning in 1990, offering martial arts instruction at school to adolescents during the difficult years when kids are facing significant life choices. The goal of our curriculum back then and now is the promotion of community and the foundation of character through discipline, responsibility, kindness, respect, courage, dedication, honesty and loyalty. More than 110,000 students have benefited from this training.

It is also an important reminder that exercise and sports are not just about movement and activity; they can be a means of honing the mind and developing a winning attitude.

Jeff Brown is a psychologist and assistant clinical professor at Harvard Medical School and coauthor of "The Winner's Brain: 8 Strategies Great Minds Use to Achieve Success." As he recently explained to CNN reporter Sandee LaMotte, "brain function improves if you're moving. That's one of the best things that you can do for your brain. And you have to sleep it -- sleep is critical to memory consolidation and learning."

"Many Olympians, especially the extremely successful ones, view stress as a challenge instead of something they should fear, said sports psychologist Dan Gould, former director of the Institute for the Study of Youth Sports and professor emeritus of kinesiology at Michigan State University," LaMotte reports. Studies of Olympic athletes over several decades have shown other common traits, habits and qualities that constitute a winner's mindset. "We call it a stress mindset," Gould says. "Any elite athlete knows there's going to be pressure, and top athletes have learned to view it as a challenge, either by trial and error or by working on mental training such as staying in the present. That has a lot of implications for everybody."

"Many of the most mentally tough and resilient athletes have a history of overcoming adversity in their past, Gould said," according to LaMotte.

"It's really hard to build resilience unless you've been challenged," says Gould. "If I protected you during your whole life and never let you figure things out for yourself, you're bound to be stressed when you hit an obstacle."

"Anyone can get overwhelmed," adds Brown. "Resilience is the piece of us that allows us to get up every time we're knocked down. I think Simone (Biles) has shown she really handles stress well and is a lot more resilient than people who never ran into that wall." LaMotte notes that, according to Gould, "The connection between adversity and peak mental performance is so strong ... that today's sports performance coaches use 'pressure training' to help their athletes prepare for competition." There is no room for doubt.

"They have to believe they're capable of performing well or they have already given the competition the advantage," says Gould. "They have to go into the event with complete confidence."

"Olympians often feel supremely self-assured because they have spent hundreds or even thousands of hours practicing their performance and learning from failures along the way," LaMotte writes.

According to Brown, "That's what the brain requires to do well, because you're creating those neuronal pathways that allow you to be precise. It's sort of a muscle memory for the brain."

Routines are also very important. "Athletes who perform well, especially under pressure, stick to their routine," says Gould. "Athletes who don't perform well, for some reason, deviate from that routine." It's striving to reach that state of being in the zone or locked in, "where everything but the task at hand disappears," as LaMotte puts it. It's really about commitment. "When you are facing one of the most important events of your life, top athletes don't focus on the outcome, they focus on the process needed to reach their goal," Gould says.

In a recent interview with PBS NewsHour's Amna Nawaz, retired Olympic speed skater Apolo Ohno said that when he looks back at his career, during which he found himself up on the Olympic podium eight times (an American winter athlete record), "his most powerful memories happened without any spectators," PBS's Laura Santhanam writes.

"It was me against myself, digging, striving, trying to find that extra 1 percent. ... While we might not always be able to control these outcomes, in that process is where the true prize can actually be."

Recent research published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine "found that even the most sedentary among us could ward off the harmful effects of sitting by incorporating more steps into our day," writes Jess Cockerill. "The more steps that people in the study took, no matter how sedentary they were otherwise, the less risk they had of (cardiovascular diseases) and even early death."

As the Chinese proverb says, "To get through the hardest journey, we need to take only one step at a time."

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Follow Chuck Norris through his official social media sites, on Twitter @chucknorris and Facebook's "Official Chuck Norris Page." He blogs at http://chucknorrisnews.blogspot.com. To find out more about Chuck Norris and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.