Ten years later

Fitness Improves Thinking (FITKids) was intended to increase the physical fitness of children through participation in developmentally appropriate physical activity to determine the effects on cognitive and brain health. Ten years later, we discuss what we learned about providing after-school physical activity. Contemporary in its initial approach, FITKids was developed as a physical education intervention to take advantage of the existing State of Illinois mandate requiring daily enrollment for students from K-12th grade. Planned backward from grade level benchmarks for children in the 3rd, 4th, and 5th grades the curriculum was based on recommendations from the 2008 Guidelines for Americans, suggesting that children participate in 60 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical each day (USDHHS, 2008). School district personnel declined our offer to teach 60 minutes of physical education, so we decided to offer the program after school because there was a need for both quality physical activity programming and after-school childcare. Acting on the feedback and pilot data, FITKids launched as an after-school program, thus beginning ten years of funded research and quality physical activity programming for hundreds of children. The purpose of this chapter is to describe the program development to the publication of seminal research.