Approaching 60, Lee Corlett is on a mission. He wants to get some risk back into the playgrounds because, as he told reporter John Maslin, without it our kids are living dangerously."
Lee Corlett maybe getting on in years but he's as fit as a fiddle.
Put that down to a career as a phys ed instructor in the defence forces that spanned 20 years, along with a degree in physical education.
And he hopes the kids growing up in Godzone will garner a smidgen of his boundless energy.
Corlett was in Wanganui this week, working with pre-school teachers and primary school kids.
He wants us to start letting our kids start taking risks again because he says we're developing a nation of softies.
"We're fighting a battle and it's called obesity," he said.
"We've got all these obese kids yet our services and our Government is making them more obese by putting restrictions on playground equipment in school grounds and stopping kids from climbing trees.
"These are all things that people of our age [he means a generation or two removed from present day primary age kids] did on the farm or a backyard or paddock but they don't happen any more."
He bemoans the fact kids are not allowed to play hopscotch anymore - and boys don't hang from the jungle gym bars.
"At one Wanganui school I had one boy who couldn't hold his arm arm out horizontal to the ground for more than five seconds. He just couldn't do it and he was among kids aged seven to nine years."
Corlett said there were two forces at work that were turning our children into "cot cases". It was partly the restrictions put in place by politically correct authoritarians but it was a parental problem as well.
"In Nelson, we have children coming to kindergarten as old as four and-a-half being pushed along in a buggy. We have parents who live 300m from kindergartens who drive their kids to the kindy every day.
"Then there are kids using a scooter to get to kindergarten. But that's not walking because they're only using one side of their body. One side's getting stronger and other side's getting left behind."
He is dismayed meeting kids who can't stand on one leg and lift their other leg up in front of their hips. These are kids who he said have known a life too long in a buggy or pram.
"They spend so much time on their back they've lost all those skills."
He has come up against parents who don't like their children doing "tummy time", where the youngsters are allowed to lie on their stomach and learn motor skills.
"Most of of these younger parents will say to me 'My daughter doesn't like doing that'. Well, my response is who runs the house? Baby or mum?" Corlett said.
"That tummy time is critical to the development of these kids when they get to kindergarten and school. Without time on their tummy they're not going to crawl, get the co-ordination patterns of movement or develop muscles in their shoulders, chest and neck.
"When they get to kindergarten the problem can't be solved, so it manifests in school. And as the kids get older, they're getting bigger and bigger, and behavioural patterns get worse all because the child wasn't given some tummy time in their very early years."
Corlett is campaigning to get back to the way we used to play - climbing trees, building huts, tearing around and learning our individual boundaries in play.
"They're just the good old fundamental movement skills that everyone, a couple of generations removed, were so familiar with."
The changes around playgrounds have been obvious. In some cases even grass areas have been removed and covered with a soft rubberised matting, again so the kids don't hurt themselves if they fall.
He says all that does is remove the element of risk, so the children never learn their boundaries.
"The kids don't know how to assess risk because we've taken it away from them. One point 2m high for outdoors equipment is the limit in kindergarten playgrounds. In Greymouth, at one school they have big yellow lines painted on trees and the children are told they are not allowed to touch or go higher than those lines.
"So then these kids go to school, where the equipment height goes up to 2.8m. But the kids coming from kindy don't know the difference. They don't realise they're jumping off something higher because they haven't assessed the risk when they were little."
The end result? Cuts, bruises or broken bones.
Corlett links this lack of understanding of risk to the country's high road toll involving people aged 15 to 17. They are dying, he says, because they don't know how to assess risk.
He has taken his crusade on the road for the past 12 years and is showing no signs of relenting.
In his home region of Nelson, he said kindergartens have come to agreement with the schools so teachers know what those kids will be physically capable of before they arrive at their classroom door.
But he knows he's taking on bureaucracy to change the rules and he knows it's a hard battle.
However, he has got the credentials to support his arguments. As well as those two decades as a PE instructor in the defence force, he has been a teacher and worked as general manager of Sport Tasman for three years. It was in this last role where he started to see kids coming into gym classes unable to do much physical exercise at all.
"So I wrote a phys ed programme and took it to a local kindergarten as an experiment on a Monday. By Friday I had 95 bookings.
"Now I work with a 1000 pre-schoolers a week," he said.
This week was on his first visit to Wanganui to outline his programme to teachers and he said what he has seen here is indicative of what he sees everywhere he goes.
"Except at the top of the South Island, where kids have been in the programme for 12 years. They're representing Nelson at elite levels in sport because they started off in kindergartens with this programme, and followed through at school."
No surprise, then, that Corlett is a strong advocate of dumping the PC attitude that cossets kids when they play organised sports.
"As one example, they've dumbed down football so much that they've taken away the joy of kids playing the game," he said.
He said taking away the drive to be first was part of the problem too.
Corlett's a realist and knows he can't bring about change on his own,. But he's confident his programme is gathering momentum - and allies - wherever it is introduced.
He says all parents should challenge their children, not wrap them in cotton wool and teach them how to assess the risks in their lives.
"They've taken the fun out of being a kid any more," he said.
He even wonders at the sense of parents not wanting their kids to run around in bare feet.
"We've got shoe-free kindergartens in Nelson where the kids come in bare feet and spend all day in bare feet. That's where some of the body's key sensors are."
And his passion for activity sees him taking a poke at information technology. He reckons it should be banned for all kids up to age 10. "They're losing the development of creative movement with their hands. They're losing the creative element of painting, drawing and writing," he say.
"I have this argument all the time with the IT people in schools, so I'm not too popular with some of them."
Those of us old enough to know, understand that all Corlett's doing is re-inventing the wheel. But if it gives kids a better understanding of their boundaries - letting them find their risk threshold - is it so bad?