Mandatory P.E. Workouts in all HK Workplaces?

Hong Kong's Mandatory Physical Activity
by Alan, Age 13, CIS

Physical exercise is a very important part of a person's life. It helps them stay healthy, active and energetic in all aspects of life. Recently China has implemented a new rule that employees of all government work places have to perform daily exercise routines. This helps workers relax during work and it improves everyone’s health. This is why I think that the Hong Kong government should make daily exercises mandatory for all companies, schools and organizations.

Hong Kong people have the busiest lives compared to people from other parts of the world. Students and workers alike have extremely tight schedules and work every day. They don’t even have much time to meet their families, let alone exercise. This why I think that I think that setting up a mandatory exercise will really help the general population of Hong Kong stay healthy and fit.  Exercising often will also help people relieve stress and help them forget their worries. Also, mornings are the prime time for people to exercise because it is when they are the most active and diligent. It will also help worker concentrate and work more efficiently throughout the day and hopefully get their work and tasks done earlier.

Many local and primaries schools across Hong Kong have mandatory exercise in place for students in the morning. A Hong Kong university study has shown that the average grades of students in schools with morning exercise is around 5 % higher than schools that don’t. Although many schools argue that they have physical education classes for students who would like to exercise during school hours, these classes are not on a daily basis and rarely occur more than a 2-3 times a week. 

Having mandatory physical exercises in the morning can help many workers and adults alike save money by not needing to attend overpriced gyms to exercise and work out. Such gyms in Hong Kong often charge at least one thousand dollars for a one month membership. Having physical morning exercises can also reduce obesity problems in Hong Kong as it becomes a rising issue throughout the general population. Although simple morning exercises do not sound as demanding and tiring as workouts in specially designed gyms, many articles published by top trainers across they work have said that if you keep exercising, even lightly, on a daily basis, it is actually more effective than going to the gym once or twice a week.

In class today, we tried exercising to an exercise song that one of the local primary schools uses each morning. I found it quite interesting as it is not quite physically demanding. Instead, it includes exercises which target various parts of my body, starting from my head and moving downwards.

However, some problems that workers might encounter while performing morning physical exercises is that when you are a front line worker such as a cashier, customers would have to wait for you when you are doing your exercise. Furthermore if you have a job such as an accountant, you may have difficulty performing such exercises because you are not wearing the right clothes. I think that these problems can be easily solved if everyone in the public did the exercise and everyone was ready and has prepared for it.

Overall I believe that having morning exercises is very beneficial to the Hong Kong people and that the government should definitely implement such a rule as soon as possible.