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Fitness, Health, and Wellness for Life

Fitness, Health, and Wellness for Life

To perform at your best, establishing a fitness routine and nutrition plan is essential to adopt a healthy lifestyle. While this may sound simple enough to master by eating right, getting enough sleep, and exercising, it is necessary to build and develop fundamental skills to stay on target and not slump back into unhealthy habits. To do this, one needs to approach fitness and wellness with a plan. If you can recognize and overcome any obstacles that may prevent you from reaching your fitness and nutrition goals, you can navigate solutions and tools to help you succeed. This strategy will also give you a baseline indicator of where you are currently in your fitness and nutrition before starting your program.  It is also necessary to develop a positive attitude and expect challenges and setbacks in even the best-laid plan. However, if you can keep coming back to your newly acquired self-management skills, it will lead you to successfully adopting a healthy lifestyle.

As an educator, it is equally important to establish a healthy lifestyle to model good exercise and eating habits for your students. Many students come to school with little to no understanding of what it means to select nutritious foods or why it is so important to exercise. They may also have many hardships at home that prevent them from receiving support and guidance on where to start with their own good choices. Through coursework that offers a practical and easy-to-understand approach, you will be able to learn and apply the basics of health and fitness to develop a healthy lifestyle for yourself and your students.

 

The Importance of Fit for Life

As a busy educator always on the go, how do you find the time to add fitness, healthy-choices, and self-management skills to keep your plan going the distance and not faltering after a few weeks or months? Although the school year is packed with activities, there is always time to find a few minutes each day to make yourself a nutritious meal or take a quick moment to get your body moving. To keep up with your personal life, professional life, and anything else you wish to accomplish, starting on a journey to health and wellness will allow you to decide how far you can push your success. Once you can establish good habits and routines, it won’t be long before you are on your way to living your best life!

Additional benefits of a healthy lifestyle include stress management, strength, mental sharpness and clarity, cardio health, flexibility, and having the choice to live an active life.

 

Benefits of the Course Fit for Life

With the course Fit for Life offered by Professional Development Courses at the University of La Verne, busy K-12 teachers and administrators will learn how to establish goals and plan a program tailored to your needs, develop skill-related physical fitness and injury prevention, moderate and vigorous physical activities, cardiorespiratory endurance, muscle fitness and flexibility, how to choose nutritious foods, stress management, lifelong fitness activities, and much more! 

Topics include:

• Define physical fitness, health, and wellness.
• Identify behaviors and activities that are part of a fit and well lifestyle.
• Identify and explain factors that contribute to weight gain and loss, including exercise and food choices.
• Explain how physical activity is related to hyperkinetic conditions.
• Describe cardiovascular health, including controllable and uncontrollable risk factors.
• Explain how to use self-management skills for living a healthy life.
• Understand what stress is and how it affects your overall well-being.
• Explain how the level of body fatness is related to good health.
• Set and work towards accomplishing physical fitness goals.
• Design a well-rounded exercise plan.

 

Fit for Life Course Contents

Successful completion of Fit for Life will lead to long-lasting benefits for yourself and your students. It may also impact your professional career by allowing you to leverage your new skills towards salary advancement, license renewal, or recertification. Students are encouraged to seek approval from their district or state before enrolling.

Contents include:

• Fitness and wellness for all.
• Safe and smart physical activity.
• Benefits of physical activity.
• Self-management skills.
• Lifestyle physical activity and positive attitudes.
• Cardiovascular fitness.
• Active aerobics and recreation.
• Flexibility.
• Muscle fitness: basic principles and strength.
• Muscle fitness: muscular endurance and general muscle fitness information.
• Body composition.
• Choosing nutritious foods.
• Making consumer choices.
• Stress management.
• Personal program planning.   

Through Fit for Life, you will develop the tools necessary to harness and adapt these fitness and health strategies through a curriculum explicitly made for busy K-12 educators and administrators. All content is self-paced, written in a user-friendly format, and accessible online 24/7 or via PDF format delivered directly to your email inbox.

This three-credit course, Fit for Life, can be applied toward the Health and Human Development Certificate offered by Professional Development Courses at the University of La Verne. Other popular course options for this timely certificate include: 

• Food and Nutrition in the 21^st Century
• Anxiety and Phobia Awareness for Educators
• Cultivating Emotional Resilience in Educators and Students
• Student Learning and the Brain
• Understanding Childhood Obesity
• Drugs: Licit and Illicit
• Eating Disorders: A Psychological Battlefield
• Child Growth and Development: Current Research
• Health Issues in the 21^st Century
• Human Development: Current Research
• Dying, Death & Bereavement: End of Life Issues
• The Family Defined and Explored: Current Research
• Making Math Meaningful, Maybe Marvelous!
• How the Brain Learns to Read: Decoding, Comprehension, and Motivation

Note, the University of La Verne is accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges. Since requirements may vary, students should check with their school district or state department of education before enrolling in a course.

  

How to Register

The course Fit for Life is completed online or via an emailed PDF format. All books and materials are mailed to the student regardless of the format selected. Featuring online chat support and quick grading turnaround times, the course is open for registration at any time during a semester. Upon completion, students receive graduate, non-degree semester credit on official transcripts from the University of La Verne, an accredited university in La Verne, California. 

Registration is simple and can be done online or over the phone. Courses are offered on a rolling basis during three standard semesters, and you can begin whenever you are ready! Courses are offered ongoing during three semesters. Students may enroll in up to a maximum of 15-semester credits at any time during each semester. 

The registration dates are:

Fall: September 1 – January 31

Spring: February 1 – May 31

Summer: June 1 – August 31

  

Our course Fit for Life offers a wide range of tools to help teachers interested in teaching the fundamental components and principles of lifetime physical fitness and other health-related factors, including learning these techniques for their benefit. Emphasis is placed on fitness and wellness by studying nutrition, weight control, stress management, fitness assessment, and consumer facts on exercise and fitness. Students will also learn strategies for planning a personal, lifelong fitness program based on individual needs, abilities, and interests. With so many topics explored in this practical course, there is no better time to start!