On the first day of Kinesiology 162: Physical Activity and Healthy Lifestyles, the professor puts to the class a simple-sounding question: What is the largest cause of death in Canada?
One student pipes up. “Heart disease?” Another says “cancer.”
“Well, that’s the pathologist’s perspective,” says the professor, Doug Richards. “But if you ask a sociologist, they’re probably going to say the answer is poverty. If you ask a psychologist, they might say social isolation. If you ask a professor of kinesiology, they’ll probably tell you, as I would, that one factor looms huge and nothing else comes close: lack of physical activity.”
So which is the correct answer? “It depends on your perspective.”
Clearly this is going to be a very different kind of kinesiology course. A class about the body that’s a workout for the mind.
KPE 162 is a health-science survey course that dips and dives through topics as diverse as cardiovascular health, gender and sexuality, nutrition and substance use. It bores deep into the determinants of health, and the interrelationship between them. Over the course of the term, students’ research and reasoning skills are sharpened to a fine point. They learn to systematically test the strength of the health claims flying at them through cyberspace. (“Eating raspberries lowers your risk of heart diseases” … says Big Raspberry. Hmm.) They develop rigour and nuance in their investigation strategies. They learn to sniff out logical fallacies and statistical faux pas – like correlation posing as causation. They do librarian-grade research, sifting through scholarly databases for UnGooglable gold. They even conduct an experiment on themselves, plotting their physical activity on a “dose response curve,” counting the calories burned and interrogating their own methodology.
In short, they learn to question everything – even what’s coming out of the teacher’s mouth. “Just because I’m a professor, doesn’t mean you should take everything I say as gospel,” Richards will tell them. “Check me out. Keep me honest.”
By the end, students have developed the reflex to continually ask themselves: “How are my personal choices related to one another? And what’s the social context they’re happening in? What are the trickle-down effects of my choosing to drive today instead of walk, or bagging a cheeseburger on the fly – not just on myself but on the world? And who or what nudged me to make those choices in the first place?
As Piaget (and Leonardo, and Einstein) said: Everything is connected to everything else.
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That’s why Richards, who has taught this course for more than 30 years, knew its name had to change. It used to be called KPE 162: Personal Health. Public Health was a separate course. “That never made sense to me, to separate them,” he says. “It’s a two-way street.”
Richards is a clinical sport physician and biomechanist best known, perhaps, as a former team doctor of the Raptors. Back in the Seventies, when he was in med school, the public understanding of health was largely a mechanistic one. The human body was a machine with a mind riding on top of it, removed and imperious. What happened from the neck down stayed from the neck down. We’ve since learned that mind and body are so intimately connected it makes more sense to think of them as a single entity, a push-me-pull-ya of neuron and meat.
And just as its name has changed, the course itself has evolved with the times. We no longer think of ‘health’ as just the absence of disease; it’s about our ability to function and to participate fully in the one rodeo we get. “If you can’t rock and roll – if you can’t enjoy recreation and dancing and all the things that make the world turn– then you’re not ‘well,” Richards says.
It’s little wonder that KPE 162 (nicknamed “Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n Roll) consistently scores among the highest ratings of any course offered in the entire University of Toronto. “What’s great about this course is that it’s applicable to your everyday life,” says Maryem Shaker, a second-year kinesiology student.
While the material is inherently interesting, everyone agrees that the straw that stirs the drink is Richards himself.
He is perpetually in performance mode, roaming the aisles like a talk-show host, jumping up on things. Sometimes there is dancing. “I’ll tell you: nobody falls asleep in this course,” Richards says. “Students leave with a grin on their face. And it’s not because I’m cracking jokes. Although I have perfected many dad jokes.”
The shenanigans, though, are always in service of the pedagogy.
“If he thinks of a personal story that’ll drive home a point he’s making, he’ll tell it,” says Xavier D’Silva, a second-year Arts & Science student.
“For example, we were talking about drugs one day, and he brought up a story of his own experience during med school — that’s the other thing about this prof: because of his experiences in, literally everything apparently, he has this deep vault of stories to draw from — one of his professors spotted him smoking outside the dissection lab. So the professor made him go and dissect smokers’ lungs, like for hours. After that he was just: ‘I probably should quit.’”
“I remember the day we learned about the conductor experiment,” says Shaker. (She’s talking about the so-called London Busmen study, by Glaswegian scientist Jerry Morris, who is sometimes known as “the man who invented exercise.”) They compared the conductors, who walked around taking tickets, to the drivers, who sat all day. Turned out the conductors lived longer and healthier lives. Dr. Richards told us that sitting for four hours a day shortens your life by several years. That was a turning point for me. Learning about how small lifestyle habits add up. During Covid, when we were all housebound. I’d think of Dr. Richards saying ‘Stasis is bad, kinesis is good!’ And then I’d get up and go for a walk!”
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So it was a no-brainer that it should it be shared more widely. KPE 162 is now open to students outside of kinesiology.
“If they’re coming from the humanities, they’re going to get introduced to a little bit of science — enough to get them examining evidence,” Richards says. “There’s a bit of biology involved: we’re talking about nutrition and digestion and how food affects us and changes our hormones. There’s a bit of physiology around the diseases. There’s critical thinking about truth claims and evidence.”
You could say that the course itself is a kind of medicine. If you’re buckling under the stress of your other courses, one you look forward to, for both the laughs and the insights, that is a win by any measure.
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“Nothing like this course existed back when I was in medical school,” he says. Even today, this broader perspective — which defines health as (in Richards’ words) “a holistic state of well-being that includes not only physical and mental health but also social and spiritual health” — is thin on the ground.
That broader lens is just not consistently applied. If it were, Richards believes, the medical-health landscape would look different. We’d put much more emphasis on getting out in front of health problems, rather than simply treating people after things have gone sideways. “Almost all medical care is still reactive rather than proactive,” Richards says. If we tended human health across the lifespan, aiming to “square the curve” of morbidity, think of the suffering we could reduce (not to mention the money we could save). There remains a desperate need to train people to think outside their silo and make mental associations – between the present and the future, between the big picture and the small, between public policy and individual lives.
That was another reason to open the course up to non-kin students. These are the people who will design buildings to nudge you to use stairs instead of the elevators; plan cities that privilege bicycle over cars; shape legislation to reward healthy behaviors and discourage bad ones.
And maybe teach the next generation to think more intentionally about what moves us.
Registration for KPE 162 is now open on ACORN. Enrol early to secure a spot.