Sections
Your Son Should Become Strong
The following essay first appeared as an article in Alvaro de Vicente’s Substack publication, Men in the Making. For more articles like this one, you can visit his page here. Subscribe to the publication to stay up-to-date on Alvaro’s writing.
This essay is part of a series entitled “Life Prep.”
In the last essay, I suggested that a freshman think about high school success in terms of growth in four areas: physical, intellectual, moral, and spiritual. In this essay and those that follow, I take each area in turn, beginning with physical growth.
Body and Soul
The goal of educating a boy is that he becomes a man. As I have written elsewhere, becoming a man means becoming a protector—indeed, a dangerously good protector. For a boy to be a man, then, he must have both the capacity to do a lot of damage and the moral rectitude to use that capacity to do a lot of good. One or the other alone will not suffice.
Even more to the point, as rational animals, we are a unity of body and soul—not one or the other alone. Becoming fully what we are, then, necessarily involves the body. The Romans understood this: mens sana in corpore sano, a sound mind in a sound body. Christians understand it even better: we profess the resurrection of the body, and death, which separates body from soul, is an evil to be overcome, not the liberation of a soul from a fleshly prison. Even apart from revelation, the natural law bids us care for the body.
Wrong Approaches to the Body
Given this view, there are several ways we can treat our bodies wrongly. We can neglect them, as though they were unimportant, through poor hygiene, poor diet, and lack of exercise. We can abuse them through excessive drinking, drugs, and reckless activity. We can worship them—what is sometimes called the cult of the body—a problem typically seen in the mirror-addicted weightlifter. Or we can pamper them, avoiding discomfort at all costs.
Strength for Service
The proper way to treat the body is to care for it so that it allows us to serve others and give glory to God for as many years as possible. St. Francis called his body “Brother Ass,” and the image is a good one. The body ought to be like a good donkey: one that knows how to obey its owner, is strong enough to work hard, and yet is not puffed-up like a peacock.
Becoming a dangerously good man involves, at a basic level, becoming physically capable. A man must be able to serve his wife and children well in the ways they need him to for many years, protecting them in ordinary ways and, if necessary, extraordinary ones. He must also be ready to serve his country and the broader human community. For all of this, he needs certain baseline physical capacities. He needs to be healthy and strong.
Of course, there may well be circumstances outside of his control that render a particular man physically unwell—a disease, an injury, and so forth—but as a general goal, the point remains. Moreover, seeking to grow physically, if rightly ordered, can itself be a means of preparing to endure such trials manfully and optimistically.
Boys, therefore, should build and care for their bodies with this idea in mind: they should want to be strong so as to serve others for many years to come. They should also want to develop their athletic gifts as much as they reasonably can so as to glorify God—in the way that driving a Ferrari fast gives glory to its manufacturer.
As an aside, for a boy, developing physically has yet another benefit: it helps him grow in self-confidence. He should not attach his self-worth to how he looks or how strong or “shredded” he may be; parents should watch for that and address it if it appears. But on the whole, it is good for a boy to be strong and healthy, and good for him to know his body can do hard things.
Five Targets for the High School Years
All of this is rather lofty. What does it mean for a high school boy? In the last essay, I suggested that a freshman ask what growth should look like in each area by the time he graduates. For the body, here are five goals worth setting.
1. Build strength and endurance. Give him access to weights, whether at home, at a nearby gym, or in the school weight room. At the start, someone—his father, a coach, a mentor—should teach him to lift properly so that he does not injure himself. Pair lifting with conditioning: running two or three miles on a regular basis, perhaps alternating with weight training. By graduation, he should have a routine he can keep up on his own, and that he habitually wants to keep up.
2. Start each day with a short workout. Every morning when he first gets out of bed, he can spend ten or fifteen minutes in his room on push-ups, sit-ups, planks, and the like. This routine helps with muscle tone, but it also builds mental strength. If you can get your body to do something a bit difficult first thing in the morning, you are more likely to get it to do hard things for the rest of the day.
3. Play several sports. It is unhealthy for all of a boy’s physical activity to be highly competitive and structured. Training is good; competing is good; but only training so as to compete and win is malformative. Sports are games, games are meant to be played, and playing ought to be fun. So he should play the sports he enjoys most. By playing several, he will develop a good degree of competence in each—enough to play basketball, football, soccer, or tennis with friends or in semi-competitive settings for years to come, and well enough to enjoy them. Sports also give him natural ways to socialize and form friendships with his peers.
4. Try to master one. That said, it can also be good for a boy to pursue one sport in which he becomes an expert. This is not only natural to many boys but also gives them the habit of focused excellence. A boy can pursue this mastery through his school team, additional individual practice, and perhaps some extra coaching.
5. Learn a lifelong sport. Finally, a boy would benefit from learning, and trying to get good at, what I call a life-long sport. I played a lot of soccer growing up and still love the game, but soccer gets harder to play as one gets older. So it is good for a boy to develop a liking for, and skill in, a sport that ages well: golf, tennis, squash, cycling. A sport he will enjoy at 15 and still do well at 65.
Club Sports?
Many families pursue that fourth goal, mastery of one sport, through club teams. I usually do not recommend joining one, especially if it involves extensive travel. This is not a hard and fast rule, and I know many families who choose club sports for their sons. But in general, I think families and boys have more to lose than to gain by playing club sports. Travel teams are expensive, and they can destroy family culture: practices fall in the evenings, conflicting with family dinner, and games and tournaments fall on weekends, often forcing parents to organize the whole weekend around them.
I find the club sports custom of scheduling regional and national tournaments during the school year a sad sign of how lightly their organizers take academics. Do high school “student athletes” benefit from missing a week of class to play in a national tournament? Perhaps the tiny minority of athletes with a real chance of becoming professional athletes do. The vast majority do not.
A high school team typically demands about 15 hours a week, and each season—fall, winter, spring—covers only about a third of the school year. Planned with that in mind, a boy can follow all of these recommendations without letting sports kidnap his whole life.
Keeping Sports in Their Place
None of this is about producing athletes per se. The hope is to form men whose bodies are ready to serve and can enjoy this life for as many years as God sees fit—both of which involve the body. We are rational animals and, as such, we have a mind. Developing it is equally, perhaps more, important. And it is the topic for the next article.
Next in the Series
Read the entire “Life Prep” series. Articles will continue to be added to this collection as the series continues.
About the Author
Alvaro de Vicente
Headmaster of The Heights School and an advisor to hundreds of school leaders, both of start-up schools and established schools seeking to revamp their offerings—especially for boys.