Bad At Sports As A Kid? Redeem Yourself This Way

Congratulations, you’re an adult — no one is going to make you play a sport you hate ever again. Now you just have to find one you like… (Photo: Getty Images/Krista Long)

In high school, my husband placed dead last in his district in both swimming and cross-country running. “That’s when I decided to check out the theater department,” he often jokes. More than a decade later, he’s active — he takes a long daily walk to catch up on podcasts, and spends his workdays hauling heavy lighting and camera equipment around movie sets — but not athletic. The closest he’s come to running is meeting me at the finish line of a 5K (after some good-natured rib-jabbing about how I choose to run in circles for fun).

According to a new study, his experience is somewhat common. People who have low sports aptitude as children are less likely to be active as adults, according to new research from the United Kingdom.

The study involved more than 12,000 UK residents that experts have been tracking since 1958. The subjects filled out surveys at age 33 and 50 about their physical activity habits. Experts from the UCL Institute of Child Health in London compared the midlife survey results to data from the participants’ childhoods to see what early-life factors see to make someone more or less likely to work out as an adult.

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Of all the factors they studied, including things like social status and parental divorce, being bad at sports as a child had the greatest impact on inactivity as an adult. Low sports aptitude increased the likelihood of being perennially sedentary by about 50 percent. Having poor coordination or being short as a kid also made someone significantly less likely to exercise later on, the study found.

“Our findings imply that early-life factors are less relevant to improvement in inactivity in adulthood and more relevant to [activity] persistence and deterioration,” the study authors write. “To our knowledge, no other study has investigated such an extensive array of early-life factors simultaneously with adult inactivity patterns.”

The study also found that about 18 percent of people started exercising more between ages 33 and 50, while about the same percentage become less physically active. The takeaway: If you want to start working out more, it’s never too late to start.

“If you’re new to physical activity, try to find something that you have found interesting or something that will keep you engaged,” says Anita Golden, fitness manager at Crunch New Montgomery in San Francisco. “People always ask me what they should start with, or what cardio they should do, and I always say, whichever one they will actually do.”

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Golden suggests power walking or DVD workouts at home if exercising around other people makes you nervous. Jogging, hiking, lap swimming, bike riding, and rollerblading are other good individual activities to try. If you like working out with other people but are worried about your coordination, try group fitness classes that stick to simple moves and basic equipment, like boot camp or indoor cycling.

“Don’t compare yourself to others — you are your only competition,” Golden stresses.

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