Quest 2007, 59, 163-169
© 2007 American Academy of Kinesiology and Physical Education
Skill and Physical Activity:
A Central Dogma for Kinesiology
Howard N. Zelaznik and William A. Harper
Kinesiology has a long and storied tradition and history. The growth of our discipline and what might be called our subdisciplines has been the shining achievement of the 1970–2006 era, spurred on by Henryʼs (1964) call for an academic
discipline. In this short thought paper, we argue that we have lost sight of the
discipline in a quest to become socially relevant. This social relevance has been
to get on the exercise as prescription bandwagon, which has produced a wide
chasm between our undergraduate curriculum and our research endeavors. The
reason for this chasm is that kinesiology does not have an agreed upon central
theme, what we call a dogma. We argue that we need to return to make skill and
physical activity the central dogma of kinesiology and to make a new coherent
curriculum for undergraduate kinesiology.
Clearly, since the beginning of our field one of the prevailing mantras has been
the benefits of physical activity on health and well-being. The Harvard lab begun
in the 1880s by Dudley Sargent, M.D., had as one of its purposes to physically
train the Harvard student such that the student would have more rigor and health.
Many talks at the Academy over the years have stressed the benefits of physical
activity on health. Our intuition is that this desire to do well for our population
and to promote the benefits of exercise and physical activity is a good thing. We
do not want to lose it. At the same time, we do not want it to engulf us, so that we
spend the majority of our intellectual time in demonstrating the obvious; namely,
that exercise and diet are good for you. In the present work, we propose that kinesiology needs a better guiding principle, a central dogma, that will not supplant
nor replace research in the current needs and trends in health, but that will always
be there in the shifting winds of current popular work. In other words, we do not
want to bank our academic futures on just showing generation after generation that
exercise is good for you.
A “sound mind–healthy body” has been one of the basic tenets of popular
ideas about the necessary relation between mind and body. One could claim that
this was one of the basic reasons for the beginnings of physical training and eventually physical education in American universities. Our academy history is full of
examples of this belief. However, in the 1950s this notion was not advancing the
cause of academic departments of physical education. Physical education needed to
The authors are with the Dept of Health and Kinesiology, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907;
Zelaznik is AAKPE Fellow #337. E-mail: hnzelaz@purdue.edu
163
164
Zelaznik and Harper
become part of the mainstream of academic life. Franklin Henry (1964) clearly saw
this, and laid out the notion of physical education as an academic discipline. Henry
believed that there was a tight relation between the discipline and the curriculum.
He made a clear distinction between the parent disciplines, such as physiology, and
the study of the effects of exercise on physiology. In this fashion, exercise physiology in physical education became the efforts to understand the mechanisms of the
effects of exercise, rather than the study of pure physiology.
We believe that we have lost that notion of an academic discipline that Henry
argued for. Instead, physical education, now called kinesiology or exercise science
in most research intensive institutions, is dominated by the notion as well as the
fervor, to show that exercise is good for you (which it obviously is); and that our
fields of interest now exist primarily to describe and catalog the benefits of exercise,
as well as the mechanisms of adaptation to exercise, or to show that individuals with
neurological disorders, for example, do not perform as well as intact individuals.
This effort to describe and catalog and study is a good thing, as the health of our
nation, as well as the world, rests to a large extent on preventive interventions, and
in documenting the description of disease and disordered conditions. Exercise and
training clearly are two of the major interventions. Understanding exercise as a
preventive prescription, as well as a medicine, is an important endeavor. However,
we believe that it is slowly overtaking our discipline and reshaping our thoughts
and intuitions about good science. With several notable exceptions, our field has
collectively decided to “prescribe” exercise to make us healthier. This is a very
utilitarian view of exercise. It is the “exercise is good for you” approach and it
should not become the be-all and end-all of our field.
We do not deny that this prescriptive endeavor has served, and will continue
to serve, our field well. It has led to many departments having grant support from
the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and this has given those departments better
credibility across campus. It also has produced a revolution in motor control with
the use of patient populations to study deficits in learning and performance in neurologically compromised individuals. This latter research also has led to increased
NIH funding. However, the goal of an academic discipline is not measured by
the level of NIH funding. Furthermore, we trust that we do not want to see our
discipline be valued purely on the basis of our level of research funding (although
administrators might), but instead on the lasting contribution to the intellectual
advances in understanding kinesiology.
We believe that kinesiology has matured to such an extent that we can in fact
adopt the Henry notion of an academic discipline; and, further, that we should expect
basic intellectual activity on the phenomenon of movement to stand side by side
with the notion of exercise as prescription. We propose that the time is right to put
the sociological-anthropological and philosophical aspects of movement back into
our undergraduate and graduate curricula in order to educate our students on the
primacy of movement as an intrinsic activity. So we ask, how would this curricular
decision redefine what kinesiology means for our academic departments?
After all, what brought most of us into the field of kinesiology in the first place?
We canʼt speak for others, but it seems to both of us that most kinesiologists were
hooked through experiencing a joy for movement. Even Purdueʼs A.H. Ismail,
who so frequently explained himself on our campus by claiming that “Exercise
is natureʼs medicine” (circa 1968–1984), was a member of the Egyptian Olympic
A Central Dogma for Kinesiology
165
basketball team before becoming a student of health and kinesiology. Bob Singer
used to say to one of us (HNZ) while we were both at Florida State University,
“Howie, anyone can run, it takes skill to play tennis” (circa 1978), when he was
trying to convince HNZ to beat him on the tennis court instead of taking a boring
run. Also, many of us express pure wonder at the skilled achievements of athletes.
“How do they do that?” is an often-asked question. In 1988, an unnamed Purdue
undergraduate asked in a class: “Why is Michael Jordan the best basketball player
ever?” More recently, yet another student asked, “Could Tiger Woods be a great
baseball player?” This type of question is also at the heart of what we could be
all about. We venture to guess that the enjoyment of physical activity and skilled
performance, or the pure intellectual wonder at high-level skilled performance,
got many of us into the field of physical education or, the new rapidly adopted
term, kinesiology.
However, our field does not promote the idea that physical activity—just the
doing of it and the study of it—is an intertwined set of noble endeavors. Instead,
it seems to us that our field narrowly promotes physical activity or exercise as an
intervention only. The constant message delivered by our field is that we need to do
exercise and we need to study exercise for utilitarian reasons: We claim that physical education in the schools is necessary in order to combat the obesity epidemic;
we argue that obesity is adverse to health and functioning; we explain that we are
truly concerned about the welfare of children; we lament that we are also truly
concerned about the health care costs associated with the lack of physical activity
and obesity; and we say—maybe not directly out of our academic mouths—that
our entire population would be better as persons if they would but stay in shape
and get with the program.
This viewpoint, again, inferred but never formally stated, we call the Intervention-Utilitarian Model of Exercise and Activity. We should be active because it is
good for us. Dr. Kenneth Cooper in the 2005 Academy keynote address promoted
this idea as one of his key messages. This activity then leads to a better quality of
life, and we should do it because it is good for the individual, good for society, and
we become a better person by way of it.
We do not deny that in many respects, this facet of our field is both important
and good. First, we as intellectuals and researchers have a duty to improve society,
and we would agree that we would like to help people lead longer and healthier lives.
Second, federal granting agencies, particularly the NIH, have recognized the need
to improve preventive approaches to health. Some of our Academy members are
funded by this NIH emphasis. The funding of our colleagues in many universities
has added cache to our academic departments, and helped solidify the worthiness
of departments in many universities.
One can get a snapshot view of this shift in emphasis to the documentation
of the benefits of exercise and physical activity by examining publications in the
Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport (RQ) in 1975 and 2005, and Medicine
and Science in Sport and Exercise (MSSE) for the same 2 years (see Tables 1 and
2). We examined the titles of all papers published in 1975 and 2005 and subjectively
categorized the topic of the paper. As RQ and MSSE have different missions and
demographics of authors, the topics are not equal. What is important is the number
of papers that were classified as studying the benefits of exercise and/or physical
activity. For RQ there were no papers published in 1975 and 11 in 2005. In MSSE,
166
Zelaznik and Harper
Table 1 Number of Papers Published in Topic Areas in Medicine
and Science in Sport and Exercise, 1975 and 2005
Basic Research
Applied Research
Biomechanics
Medicine
Sport and Exercise
Psychology
Benefits of Exercise
Miscellaneous
1975
2005000000000
30
10
5
4
0
8900000000
7900000000
3300000000
2800000000
70000000
2
0
5400000000
40000000
Table 2 Number of Papers Published in Topic Areas in Research
Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, 1975 and 2005
Exercise Physiology
Biomechanics
Motor Behavior
Sport and Exercise
Psychology
Test & Measurement
Special Population
Pedagogy
Benefits of Exercise
Miscellaneous
1975
2005000000000
10
8
10
15
60000000
20000000
1300000000
70000000
4
1
6
0
3
4000000
00000000
50000000
11
3
the change is equally dramatic. In 1975 two papers were concerned with documenting benefits of physical activity, while in 2005 that number had increased to 54. It is
also interesting to see that what we termed applied research (involving documenting
expert versus noviceʼs differences, for example) also showed a large increase. The
MSSE results also highlight the growth of exercise science in particular. MSSE
published more issues in 2005, and clearly published more papers.
In addition, in 1988 the Journal of Sport Psychology, after just 11 short years,
changed its name to the Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology. Many scholars
describe themselves as being exercise psychologists, and do not believe the study of
sport is worthy of intellectual energy. Again, we are not passing judgment on these
changes in our fields, but instead are pointing out the shift in fields of research to
the exercise center, rather than to the playing field.
What can we say about the costs of this push to document that exercise and
physical activity are good for people? The cost is that we have lost the articulation
A Central Dogma for Kinesiology
167
between our curriculum on the undergraduate level and what has become the de
facto discipline of the benefits of exercise as the growing and predominant research
agenda. This also has led to a distinct separation of the undergraduate degrees in
pedagogy (teacher education) and those in kinesiology (called exercise science,
movement science, or human performance, for example). It has also led to a very
fragmented curriculum. It has led to several departments leaving kinesiology and
becoming integrative physiology departments, for example. It seems to us that this
move to scientific respectability, which of course is a good turn of events in itself, has
thrown out the baby with the bath water. We argue that at this time there is not a central
idea that ties all of our intellectual activities and curricular endeavors together.
This is not the state of a mature discipline. To make matters a bit more muddled,
we are not a pure discipline. We are biochemists of exercise, neuroscientists of
movement, psychologists of sport, or educational researchers. Probably many of
us think of ourselves as psychologists, and kinesiology is just a place where we
can get a lab and get tenured. It seems to us that what we need is some construct
or endeavor that provides us with a constant, consistent center; and, this center
provides us with intellectual stability and at the same time provides the stable
structure for dynamic activity in research.
Biology obviously has evolution at its center; physics has relativity and quantum mechanics at its center; mathematics has the calculus as its common ground;
and even psychological sciences, a less mature science, at least agrees that they
are in different fashions studying how the brain works. These centers can be called
a central dogma. Although today the more popular use and meaning of the word
“dogma” often suggests taking a position without evidence or good reasons for
it, the origins of the word refer more primarily to a doctrine, or a set of beliefs or
tenets, or a settled opinion. In other words, each field has an accepted dogma that
all members of the discipline are schooled in, and although oneʼs particular research
areas might or might not be related to these notions, the core beliefs provide a
common center for all of the members of that community. In fact, from time to
time arguments about the central dogma itself can occur, leading to what has been
regularly called paradigm shifts (Kuhn, 1970).
So, is there a central dogma for kinesiology? We believe there is. Although
our details are a bit different from those of Newell (2007), we believe that physical
activity and skill (broadly defined) should be the central dogma of kinesiology. Our
intellectual disciplines should be centered on describing and explaining acute and
chronic adaptations to physical activity and skill. Pedagogical scholars should be
concerned with championing techniques for the maximization of skill development
and chronic adaptations to physical activity.
Before we continue, we need to back up one step and be certain that readers understand that we are using the term skill in a very broad sense. We are not
just meaning skill learning. Rather we mean physical activity is the central core.
Studying the principles of exercise physiology is part of this central dogma. Physical education teachers also should teach the principles of exercise physiology in
physical education classes. It is important that students learn how to exercise just
as it is important to learn tennis.
This central dogma also reopens areas of investigation no longer in vogue.
For example, why do we move? What is it about movement that provides intrinsic
motivation? What is the relation between physical skill and mental skills? We also
168
Zelaznik and Harper
need to revitalize the history of physical activity and movement. Do our students know
about Triplett (1898) who was the first to study competition in the laboratory?
So, how does kinesiology not throw out the baby with the bath water? We
clearly need to be players on the national agenda of health, fitness, disease prevention, and physical activity. However, we need to take our place on that stage by going
back to understanding the learning, performance, physiological, psychological,
and pedagogical foundations of physical activity. Our undergraduates need to be
schooled in this, our discipline, broadly defined in a way we believe is consistent
with the Henry notion of our academic discipline. In Figure 1 we present a conceptual model for this new kinesiology.
At the center of our model is skill and physical activity. Students need to have
procedural, pedagogical, as well as theoretical knowledge of the central dogma.
They will gather this by having the curriculum provide in-depth work in each of
these three areas. Yes, that means a student of movement science, should in fact
“have a skill,” the same way a student in a school of music, usually has an instrument. It could be argued that physical skill is not a necessary prerequisite for
conducting research on skill. That clearly is true on the research professor level
(we hope so). It is most likely not true when teaching undergraduates about skill
adaptations.
We need to develop a seamless tapestry between elementary, secondary physical education programs, and undergraduate kinesiology. We need to move physical
education away from building moral character, via improving the health of our
children. This cannot be the primary goal of physical education. In other words,
we need to get off of the pulpit and back to our core foundation—that competence
in skilled activity makes kinesiology unique, our central dogma. Competency will
lead to adherence (Weiss, 2000). People will adhere to activity not because they
are taking medicine, but because the act of moving is inherently fun, even joyful
at times, and intrinsically motivating. Will people still exercise for disease prevention and for rehabilitation? Yes, they will. But, in kinesiology exercise regimes for
Figure 1—A conceptual model of the relationship between performance, theoretical and
pedagogical endeavors and skill.
A Central Dogma for Kinesiology
169
prescription and/or prevention will not be the sole focus, nor the raison dʼêtre for
kinesiology.
This renewed focus on skill leads to a rejoining of the efforts of faculty now
considered as in pedagogy, and those faculty now seen in movement science.
While these labels clearly will stay, and will demarcate research emphases, the
teaching of pedagogy, the teaching of exercise physiology, motor learning, motor
development, must adapt to become important for the students who will go out
into the schools helping students achieve skill, not just running around for the sake
of exercise. Fifteen years ago, one of us (Zelaznik, 1990) argued that the issues in
pedagogy are the domain only of pedagogy. One of us believes that he was a bit
mistaken. We need to be concerned how skills are taught, because that is part of
our central dogma.
We close with a lesson. One of Franz Kafkaʼs (1936, 1970) parables is called
“The Great Wall of China.” It is a longish parable, but the point of it is that when
the people began building the Great Wall, they basically knew what they were
doing and why they were doing it. According to William Barrett (1979), “It was to
keep out the nomads and preserve civilization; and its building was accomplished
with much idealism and enthusiasm.” But in time, the wall was built piecemeal,
500 or 1,000 yards at a time, and the sections were often many miles apart from
one another. Given that the building went on for generations, a section at a time,
the people eventually lost all notion of why they were building the wall. They had
not only lost contact with each other; they had lost contact with the capital. “They
do not even know whether this center still holds, if the Empire itself still stands,”
writes Barrett. “Yet they continue to carry on their meaningless labor, no longer
knowing what their purpose is in doing what they do.” In other words, the builders
of the Great Wall had lost contact with the center.
In order to avoid the fate of the builders of the Great Wall, we must recapture
our central dogma. We must know what we are doing and why we are doing it. We
believe that kinesiology and physical education must swing the pendulum back to
a more balanced and centered view. We have given up the territory of skill learning and the joys of physical activity in order to promote the notion of exercise as
preventive medicine. Letʼs make contact again with our center. Are we to become
an allied health profession? Our answer is, just a little bit. Are we to go back to
instilling skill in our students? Our firm answer is, yes.
References
Barrett, W. (1979). The Illusion of Technique, New York: Anchor Books, 135-136.
Kafka, F. (1936, 1970). The Great Wall of China, New York: Schocken Books, 83-97.
Henry, F.M. (1964). Physical Education—An academic discipline. Journal of Health, Physical Education and Recreation, 35, 32, 69-70.
Kuhn, T.S. (1970). The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Newell, K.M. (2007). Kinesiology: challenges of multiple agendas. Quest, 59, 5-24.
Triplett, N. (1898). The dynamogenic factors in pacemaking and competition. American
Journal of Psychology, 9, 507-533.
Weiss, M.R. (2000). Motivating kids in physical activity. Presidentʼs Council on Physical
Fitness and Sports Research Digest, 3, 1-8.
Zelaznik, H.N. (1990) Commentary. Quest, 42, 193-196.