Bring Back Jump Rope for Heart
Dear Prime Minister,
I have a question. When exactly did Canadians become convinced that fitness requires a monthly payment? Because I distinctly remember being taught the opposite. I remember Jump Rope for Heart, soccer fields, and basketball nets attached to driveways across suburban Canada. Most importantly, I remember that nobody seemed confused about how exercise worked. We moved because movement was normal… we exercised without calling it exercise.
A few days ago, while reflecting on old habits I had recently rediscovered, (like working out at home using my own body weight, and going for jogs around my neighbourhood), I found myself thinking about fitness. Not fitness as an industry, but as a memory. Moving simply because my body wanted movement. None of this was new information. We learned it as children. Long before fitness became an industry, we knew how to move our bodies. We ran, climbed, skipped rope… we played games and called it fun instead of discipline.
That realization led me somewhere unexpected, because the more I thought about it, the more I wondered whether fitness might be another thing we’ve collectively forgotten. Not how to optimize it, monetize it, or how to track it, but how to do it. Prime Minister, I am old enough to remember when fitness was something children learned before it became something adults purchased. We learned it in schoolyards, parks, physical education classes, community sports, and neighbourhood games that required little more than a patch of grass and a handful of willing participants. Nobody handed us a subscription. Nobody sold us a lifestyle. Nobody told us we needed matching outfits, wearable technology, or a personal trainer. They handed us a jump rope and told us to start moving. And somehow, that was enough.
Somewhere between then and now, something changed. Today, fitness is treated less like a public good and more like a consumer product. We have convinced ourselves that health lives behind a paywall (gym memberships, fitness apps, branded water bottles, monthly subscriptions designed to teach us things we already knew.)
I can’t help wonder if we accidentally forgot some of our own successful ideas, because Jump Rope for Heart was never really about jump ropes. It was about teaching children that movement belonged to them. That exercise could be social and health could be joyful. That physical activity did not require wealth, only participation.
Yet today, childhood obesity rates continue to concern parents, educators, and health professionals across the country. The solution is often discussed as though it is complicated. More programs. More spending. More interventions. Perhaps some of those things are necessary. But before we invent entirely new solutions, I wonder whether we should revisit some of the old ones.
After all, Canada already spent generations teaching children how to move. We already had programs that made fitness social, accessible, and fun because we understood that healthy habits begin long before adulthood. The question is not whether we can teach these lessons. The question is why we stopped trusting them.
Perhaps before we design another app, commission another study, or launch another campaign, we should hand a child a jump rope and get out of the way.
Respectfully,
Karny