Comment by tekla
1 day ago
The jocks at my school (Championship Winners) were also simultaneously the smartest kids at it. Most went to Ivy Leagues on academic scholarships. I know a few of them were the first engineers on several well known unicorns.
The nerd/jock dichotomy is rooted in envy.
There is an unspoken presumption many people live believing that the various qualities people can have must be evenly divided among people, because somehow it would otherwise be “unfair”. Got brawn? Can’t have brains. Got X? Can’t have Y. Etc. It’s a coping strategy for weak people with big egos.
The fact is that in primary school, a “nerd” wasn’t necessarily all that “intelligent” even in some narrow sense. If you are inept at something or insecure about it, you might gravitate toward things that avoid it. So you invest time in that activity.
Of course, if the brain is the seat of intelligence, and the brain is just a part of the body, and an intelligent brain is a healthy brain, then it follows that a healthy body overall is more likely to have a healthy brain and thus an intelligent brain. Conpare this with the ancient expression “Mens sana in corpore sano”.