The short- and long-term effects of quality physical education programs have been a subject of considerable debate by educational administrators and state legislators during the past decade. While physical educators have repeatedly demonstrated the importance of daily moderate and vigorous physical activity on the immediate health and wellbeing of their students, the effects of such involvement on the academic achievement or the future lifestyles of participants remains open to question. A recent retrospective study by Shephard and Trudeau (2005) examined how a group of 546 Canadian primary school students (grades 1-6), who were given five hours per week of professionally administered physical education, fared on an aggregate of physiological, anthropometric, and psychomotor variables, when compared to a control group that received only minimal physical education from their homeroom teachers. Results revealed that the subjects who participated in the professionally administered physical education programs had greater peak oxygen intake and greater strength than their counterparts in the control group in the second- through fifth-grade range, and that they performed better on 25 of 36 of the tests contained in the Canadian Association for Health, Physical Education, and Recreation physical performance assessment. Through the description of the samples studied, the treatments administered, and the general experimental design characteristics, the authors were able to show a causal link between quality physical education during the primary grades and the positive physiological and psychomotor effects that resulted. However, the other longitudinal findings reported are less clear in their significance.