Taking on challenges, are you ready?

Joyce Hunter SEVEN Director

Alrighty. It’s time to see how many of you are ready to rise to The Daily SEVEN Fitness Challenge.

Basically this challenge will have you committing to working out a minimum of 30 minutes a day for three days per week. The challenge itself will last for seven weeks. Hint: if you work out harder than the minimum we are asking, you stand to win a prize (which is part of the deal)!

The rules will require that each participant recruit someone like a school gym teacher or local police officer as they would have had training in anatomy and calisthenics to measure and monitor your progress. There are a specific set of exercises we are asking you to do for this challenge, and they are available on our website. The website has two instructional videos as well as exercise tip sheets that you can download, print out and stick on the wall to use as a reference while you’re working out. Both show you how to do The Daily SEVEN Challenge exercises.

Nishnawbe Aski Police Service (NAPS), which serves 35 NAN First Nation Communities, has thrown its support behind this project. All NAPS officers stationed in the First Nations have been notified that the project is going to take place, what it entails and that the officers should support it if they are approached by local youth to measure and monitor their progress.

Dennis Franklin Cromarty High School, which hosts nearly half of NAN’s 49 First Nations students, has also thrown its support behind this project. They provided the students who serve as demonstrators for the instructional videos as well as the venue where the instructional videos were shot.

This project was also made possible through the support of Lakehead University’s School of Kinesiology, who were good enough to put together the testing sheets to be used to measure the challenge’s participants.

As partners in this project, our combined goal is to teach youth about the benefits of making a decision and sticking to it. In my mind, any youth who would have participated in this project is a winner because they would have increased physical fitness and all the benefits that go with it (reduced stress levels, able to sleep better, lowered likelihood of depression, improved digestion, circulation, respiration, posture, physical strength, increased self confidence and lowered body weight) And all this just in time for our News Years resolution to lose weight. Yeeha!