Physical Abilities and Mental Skills is a Sport

In our modern society, many sports play a major role in American’s culture. There are several clashing viewpoints into what represents a sporting activity. I believe that any activity that involves physical abilities and mental skills should be a sport. To be a sport-man, an individual must demonstrate to have both qualifications. I believe that physical activities like tennis, football, basketball, baseball, and recreational activities such as dancing and cheerleading to be sports

These mentioned sports demand a healthy physical and mental fitness. To be able to perform well in these sport activities, an individual must possess the abilities of coordination, focus, balance, speed, strength, flexibility, agility, and reaction to time. I do not believe that physical activities such as eating contests, horseback riding, and motocross qualify as sports. These activities did not require physical preparations or mental practices for an individual to perform it.

Two physical activities that I believe qualified as sports are dancing and cheerleader. Like any other sport, dancing has its guidelines and the performers must follow the rules of competition. Dancers can perform as a large group of competitors or they can perform as soloist. A dancer must be in good physical condition because dancing requires strength, endurance, agility, dedication, skills, and coordination. A dancer must do warm up exercises before performing a physical practice. For a good performance, an individual dancer must remember and practice dancing steps and dancing coordination. In a sport dancing, the performers participate in competitions and the winner dancers win prizes. Overall, dancing is just as intense as any other sport and can be dangerous at times. If a dancer fails to follow a dancing step correctly, the individual can get seriously hurt.

Cheerleaders are commonly seen on the sidelines at football and basketballs games supporting their teams. Cheerleading is a sport because it involves physical exercises and mental skills. A cheerleader must be in healthy shape because the individual goes through a rigorous training of warm up stretches, uses lots of energy practicing dancing steps, tumbling, heel stretches and splits to perform a perfect routine. Cheerleading can be considered a dangerous sport. A cheerleader squad must do flips, lift and hold up in air another individual for a full stunt sequence without dropping the person. Any little mistake in a given routine can cause a serious injury or break a body part.

In modern society, people are taught what is considered a sport and non-sport. I believe that some video games should be considered as sports. The video gamers spend large amount of time developing new skills that will help them to win games. They need to have fast reaction time. The players brain must keep up with the pace of the action to be able to increase hand-eye coordination, since the games are constantly going through different scenarios. In preparation for some video games, team members have to eat healthy, do yoga exercises and sometimes train for eight hours a day. Single players may practice alone for five hours. The video games that I do not considered as sports are those that only require pattern’s recognition, memorization, eye movements, and little body movements.

I believe that pole dancing can be considered a sport because is a form of exercise that can be used as an aerobic and anaerobic. It requires a significant muscular endurance and coordination. Also, it requires significant strength, flexibility and timing. The reason why I believe that pole dancing is a sport is because a dancer must go through a rigorous training to develop a strong upper body strength, able to do exercises like arms workout, bicep curls, legs squats, and shoulder press. Other trainings include hip stretch, hamstring stretch, bicycle crunches, quad stretch, box splits, jack-knife sit ups, hip bridge, push -ups, lunges, and cobra stretch. Overall, this activity is considered a sport in other countries which celebrate pole dancing competitions, also there is the guarantee that it will become a major tournament in future Olympics. I do not believe that pole dancing could called sport when it performed for creational purposes like in a bar or in a private room. Those poles dances do not go through the rigorous training that a professional pole dancer needs to perform well in a competition.

Sports are an important part of society and many of them are taught in schools. This is a good way for kids to learn to work as team members. It teaches students about the important roles that creates a team. Lastly, it teaches students that in a sport team each member must work together for a common goal, value, and ethnics. At the end, children can apply this idea within the outside world. Overall, society place a high value on physical competitions, therefore rewards are given to the participants.

Sport has been a social avenue for society to celebrate the greatness of the human spirit. Sport brings the community or a nation to share happiness. Human beings are focus on sports because they crave for sudden victories, and champions to rise to the occasion. Sport inspires the spectators to never give up, to change their ways of live through a culture of fitness. Overall, the spirit of sport is to teach an important quality such sportsmanship. Sportsmanship is important in the context of athletics to make the experience of playing sports to be pleasant. Lastly, it teaches the respect in sports and teaches young athletes to respect rules and authority.

The new age definition of sports discriminates on certain physical activities. The federation of sports must follow the new age definition of sport to regulated the number of physical activities that can be called sports. The definition has created a label on sports between recognizable and less recognizable physical activities. This division had created a great deal of confusion of which physical activities should be taken more seriously than others when defining what is a sport.