School districts receive grants to promote fitness

NEW LEXINGTON, OH - What used to be home economics has transitioned into a nutrition and wellness class for students of Crooksville High School.

The class, required for graduation, is only one of many changes the school and district are implementing to encourage physical fitness and healthy lifestyles for their students and staff.

Soon a one-mile walking trail will line the campus, complete with physical fitness stations along the way. New fitness equipment, including a climbing wall with a dry-erase surface, will be in the gym, candy and pop can no longer be found in the vending machines and even pre-schoolers are learning about nutrition from recently purchased educational material.

"We're pretty excited. We've gotten off to a pretty good start," said Crooksville High School Principal Jacqueline Bolyard.

The Crooksville Exempted Village School District, New Lexington City Schools and the Southern Local School District each received a $50,000 grant from the Osteopathic Heritage Foundation in Nelsonville. It's a grant called the Healthy and Fit in Southeastern Ohio initiative and is a multi-year initiative designed to improve the health, physical activity and nutrition of families.

"The biggest thing is impacting the health of the students. We hear about the obesity epidemic so much in the news and Perry County is number one in the state for the rate of diabetes, so any impact that schools can have on that," said Deborah Raney, cardiovascular grant coordinator at the Perry County Health Department.

With the help of school administrators, teachers and parents she's helped form wellness committees within the schools and has helped guide districts through the grant writing process to earn the foundation grants.

"They (teachers) see those children many more hours than what parents might actually see them. Being a role model, teaching physical health and activity is very important," she said.

The Southern Local School District has also started a wellness committee and already had a fitness trail, but will receive upgrades, like getting paved, with some of the grant money.

A fitness center for staff is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week on school grounds and has about 20 pieces of equipment.

"For our little district, a very poor district, we're doing a lot to try and improve the health and wellness of not only kids, but the community," said Dzidra Brown, district nurse.

The home economics class at Miller High School is now a nutrition and wellness class and nutrition information is being incorporated into the curriculum in the physical education classes.

Vending machines now carry Gatorade or flavored water instead of pop and administrators are exploring options to replace unhealthy snacks in the machines.

"Kids today don't eat healthy enough and we aren't active enough. The schools are able to be a role model and provide healthy cafeteria choices and teachers are being more aware of the need for more physical activity," Raney said.

She said Hocking College has volunteered labor for the school projects, The Shelly Company, based in Thornville, donated $10,000 for material and the Perry County Engineer's Office has hauled stone at cost for the projects.

"It fell into place. It's just been one of those community projects people are involved in and excited about," Raney said.

Zanesville TimesRecorder
LEEANN MOORE August 29, 2008

Treadmill Workouts Help Stroke Survivors

Function improved even after conventional therapy, study found

THURSDAY, Aug. 28 -- Working out on a treadmill improves brain function and fitness for people who have survived a stroke and gone through the usual rehabilitation program, a new study found.

"You address two problems these patients have," said study researcher Dr. Andreas Luft, a professor of clinical neurology and neurorehabilitation at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. "One is that they don't know how to walk. Not walking, they become deconditioned and lose cardiovascular fitness. With the treadmill type of training, you improve walking and also increase fitness."

Luft worked with physicians at Johns Hopkins University, the University of Maryland and the Baltimore Veterans Affairs Medical Center on the study. It compared the brain and physical function of 37 people who had had strokes and worked on a treadmill three times a week, with 34 people who were given traditional stretching exercises.

After six months, peak walking velocity increased by 51 percent in the treadmill group and just 11 percent in the stretching group. Cardiovascular fitness increased by 18 percent with the treadmill routine, but decreased by 3 percent in the group limited to stretching.

And magnetic resonance imaging showed an increase of blood flow carrying more oxygen to the brainstem and cerebellum for those who worked on the treadmill.

"The most important clinical aspect of the study is that it is saying recovery can occur long after a stroke and can occur even after all the routine therapies have been tried," said Dr. Daniel Hanley, professor of neurology at Johns Hopkins. "Scientifically, the most important point appears to be that rewiring of the brain may be involved in this process, not just body conditioning."

The average age of study participants was 63, and the average time they began the treadmill program was 50 months after the stroke, Hanley noted.

"The average stroke patient now has about eight physical therapy sessions over six to 12 weeks," Hanley said.

The study, published in the Aug. 29 issue of the journal Stroke, shows that treadmill work "should be part of standard treatment for every stroke survivor who has a walking habit," Luft said.

That may not be an easily achievable goal, Luft acknowledged. "Most physical therapy departments have treadmills, but they don't use them to the extent that we used them in the study," he said.

And stroke survivors can't just climb on a treadmill and start walking, Luft said. "Because this is exhausting, it should always be done under supervision," he said. "There is always the risk of running into heart problems and falling. We used special treadmills with handrails and also monitored the heart rate to achieve the level of exertion we needed."

Nevertheless, Hanley said, "the study defies current practice."

By Ed Edelson
HealthDay News