Mental Health and Wellness - Fitness 4 Success

Mental Health Training

Mental health is an important component of healthy active living. The harmonious balance of mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical health, is important to maintain positivity, happiness, and social well-being. At Fitness 4 Success, our Mental Health Training component focuses on maintaining this balance.

Studies have found that a commitment to exercise is important in reducing anxiety and depression, as well as improving self-esteem and sleeping patterns. Group programs have the additional effect of social support, social facilitation, group motivation, and reduction of loneliness. Our programs utilize a proactive approach to get children engaged and involved in their journey to maintaining positive well-being.

For Educators:

Any student can benefit from exercise, and our atmosphere provides a positive, holistic means of addressing this. Each field trip, in-school program, and after-school program incorporates fitness in an engaging and fun way that will help in stress relief and positive well-being.

Often schools have dedicated weeks to Mental Health or Physical Activity. We encourage educators to involve interactive fitness and exergaming as apart of this awareness program, to expose youth to how they can have an active involvement in their own mental well-being.

For Families:

It is important to take depression and other negative mental states in young individuals seriously, and attempt to understand these conditions from their point-of-view. Growing up, children face pressures when it comes to appearance, social identity, changes in their physical health, changes in their thinking, and changes in their emotions and feelings.

Our interactive program will combine exercise with mental health activities in a fun way . This will involve an initial assessment to evaluate them on scales of depression, anxiety, physical health, physical performance, and self-efficacy, self-esteem. From this assessment we will set goals for the individual to achieve to take an active stance in their road to fulfilment.

Sample Schedule:

Warmup / Dynamic Stretch
Fundamental skills training
Yoga
Interactive Fitness and Exergaming
Meditation and reflection

10 Healthy Habits for Mental Fitness (Click for PDF version)

Values

Our program will combine exercise, coping strategies, and goal setting to help improve performance on these important mental health domains:

Ability to enjoy life: To engage in activities that will bring about positive emotions and good feelings
Resilience: To adapt to negative changes in a strong and constructive fashion. Allowing a short period of emotional grievance after a negative event, before taking on an objective perspective to your situation and moving forward.
Balance: Being able to balance tasks/work with an appropriate amount of recreational, leisure, and social time.
Self-actualization: Understanding of yourself, your identity, talents, strengths, and weaknesses
Flexibility: The ability to consciously adjust your values, behaviours, and emotions, based on what you’ve learned from recent circumstances and events.

Mental Illness

Mental illness is a serious disturbance in thoughts, feelings and perceptions that is severe enough to affect day‐to‐day functioning. Some names for mental illnesses are: schizophrenia, depression, bi‐polar disorder, anxiety disorders, eating disorders and borderline personality disorder. Proactive prevention of mental illness means utilizing a holistic approach to healthy active living that will involve changes in the individual’s self, their environment, and the roles of their peers/supporters.