This summer, many rising sophomores will free up a class block next year by taking Health and PE 10 online. Is this oftentimes annoying class worth it? 

For over 10 years, Virtual Loudoun has offered online classes such as Health and PE as alternatives to in-person classes. With many students hoping to free up a class block for an extra elective during the year, these summer classes have become a popular choice, particularly Health and PE 10. 

Many students sign up for this course expecting online PE to be an easy, almost laughable course. After all, can the teacher really confirm that a student does all 6 hours of weekly exercise? The short answer, surprisingly, is yes, because students must painstakingly track and submit each minute they count toward their weekly workout total. 

The course consists of two main components (three if you’re taking Driver’s Ed on top of it, but that is a whole different story): six hours of physical activity a week recorded in a fitness log, and an abundance of projects. 

While six hours of exercise weekly is not an outrageous ask, the elaborate limitations and requirements that come with the fitness logs are over-the-top, to say the least. Students must use a fitness watch to track and record each and every one of their workouts, including the duration of the activity and their heart rate throughout. They are then required to screenshot this data and upload it to the log, which is a very tedious process. 

For instance, the rules of the course say that students can not include more than 90 minutes of any one activity in their fitness log in a week. For students who are in a sports season or preseason, this quickly proves obnoxious. For example, a student who does summer swim team and swims for 90 minutes every morning can only mention 90 of the nearly 540 minutes of swimming they do in a week in their fitness log.

The fitness log’s heart rate requirements can also deem sessions of perfectly effective workouts as not good enough. Weightlifting and pilates, for example, are not supposed to raise one’s heart rate very much. So on top of the 90-minute activity limitations, the heart rate requirements are an additional factor that makes reaching six hours of varied activity that much harder.

The class’s rigidity is exhausting, stressful, and burnout-inducing because, on top of the physical activity requirements, students have to complete a ton of projects, many of which feel completely useless (ex. going door to door in a T-shirt with a homemade slogan about safety). In an in person Health and PE class, the health grade is often determined by tests alone, so why is online health so much more involved? 

With all this in mind, online Health and PE 10 is really only worthwhile for students who are certain that they need an extra block during sophomore year, or those who do not mind the majority of their summer being taken up by the class. Otherwise, it may be more beneficial for sophomores to spare the summer hassle and take the class in person.