Spark

by John J. Ratey

During the weekly mile, he tested the device on a sixth-grade girl who was thin but not the least bit athletic. When Lawler downloaded her stats, he couldn’t believe what he found. “Her average heart rate was 187!” he exclaims. As an eleven-year-old, her maximum heart rate would have been roughly 209, meaning she was plugging away pretty close to full tilt. “When she crossed the finish line, she went up to 207,” Lawler continues. “Ding, ding, ding! I said, You gotta be kidding me! Normally, I would have gone to that girl and said, You need to get your ass in gear, little lady! It was really that moment that caused dramatic changes in our overall program. The heart rate monitors were a springboard for everything. I started thinking back to all the kids we must have turned off to exercise because we weren’t able to give them credit. I didn’t have an athlete in class who knew how to work as hard as that little girl.” He realized that being fast didn’t necessarily have anything to do with being fit. One of Lawler’s favorite statistics is that less than 3 percent of adults over the age of twenty-four stay in shape through playing team sports, and this underscores the failings of traditional gym class. But he knew he couldn’t have the students run the mile every day, so he set up a program of what they have termed “small-sided sports”—three-on-three basketball or four-on-four soccer—where the students are constantly moving. “We still play sports,” Lawler says. “We just do them w...