New fitness program for hockey fans coming to Swift Current
If you’re out of breath after the physical effort to reach your seat at a Swift Current Broncos game, you might be a good candidate for a new fitness program for hockey fans.
Western University is currently looking for out of shape male hockey fans in the Swift Current area to join a free 12-week off-ice exercise and healthy lifestyle program.
The Hockey Fans in Training (Hockey FIT) research team at Western University, based in London, Ontario, is partnering with the Swift Current Broncos, the City of Swift Current and STRIDE Physio & Performance to offer this program to local fans of the game who want to get fit, lose weight and have fun.
The program recruitment in Swift Current is part of the roll-out of Hockey FIT in communities across western Canada in partnership with Western Hockey League teams.
Dr. Brendan Riggin, the head coach for the Hockey FIT program, said their goal is to improve men’s health across the country, because the poor health of Canadian men is costing the health care system almost $37 billion per year.
“The good news is that if we can get guys to be more active and lose some weight, then up to 70 per cent of those costs are preventable,” he mentioned. “That’s why our program was created, to try and prevent some of this strain on the health care system and taking a bit more of a preventative approach as opposed to a reactive approach.”
It is often a challenge to get men to participate in healthy lifestyle programs, because they cannot really relate to the existing options. Feedback from men and their own research at Western University indicated men prefer to participate in a group-based program with other men who have similar interests.
“We’ve tried to fill that gap by creating what we call a gender sensitized program, meaning that both the content that we discuss as well as the style of delivery is geared specifically for men who are in 35 to 65 age range and they’re all fans of their local hockey team,” he said. “What makes our program a little bit different is that it’s often a group of guys who don’t know one another, but they become close very quickly, because they’re all trying to achieve this common goal of improving their health while bonding over sports talk.”
The research team considered other aspects when they designed this program, for example men enjoy the use of humour to discuss some of the more sensitive health issues and they often link physical activity to sport, athleticism and competition.
The Hockey FIT program grew out of a successful pilot project presented in 2014 in partnership with the London Knights and Sarnia Sting junior hockey teams in Ontario, which was funded by the Movember Foundation.
“We were able to demonstrate that by offering a healthy lifestyle program in partnership with sport organizations, specifically hockey here in Canada, we’re able to help improve men’s health,” he said. “The guys have lost about 10 pounds after just a 12-week program, where they met once a week for 12 weeks, and we saw a number of other beneficial health outcomes, such as blood pressure and waist circumference.”
Since then the program has received funding from the Public Health Agency of Canada and the Canadian Institute of Health Research to expand the program to at least 32 communities across the country.
According to Dr. Riggin there has been a fantastic response from hockey teams partnering with the program and teams are enthusiastic about this initiative.
“It targets a bit of a different demographic than some of the other community initiatives that they’ve already participated in,” he said. “Ours are specifically trying to improve the health of their fans. So it’s been a great partnership, because a lot of these hockey organizations want to give back to their fan base and they want to help out in the community as much as they can, and we sort of facilitate that by offering this Hockey Fans in Training program as a vehicle for them to do that.”
The Hockey FIT program offers various features to make it easy to participate in. It can accommodate the different fitness levels of participants, which are then build up over the 12week period, and the exercises do not require any special equipment.
“All of our exercises that we introduce are plyometric based, meaning that it just requires your body weight,” he said. “One of the things we’ve heard from the guys in the past is that they appreciate the simplicity of these exercises, because they can often do it from the comfort of their own home.”
All the training takes place on dry land, but they try to incorporate hockey related drills in the sessions, for example stick handling through pylons. Sessions include education about physical activity and healthy eating tips, but there is not any diet program for weight loss.
The results from their pilot program indicated that healthy lifestyle tips are more effective to help participants with weight loss that will be maintained after the program has ended.
Another unique feature of the program is the opportunity for participants in the different communities to get behind-the-scenes access to team dressing rooms, and team players and personnel will show up at their training sessions.
“It’s very exclusive in that they get this access that not many people in the community get, but it’s all build into part of the program,” he said.
Dr. Riggin noted that although the Hockey FIT program is currently only offered to men, they are in the process of creating a similar program for women.
Recruitment for the Hockey FIT program in Swift Current has already started and will continue until mid April with potential start date in May. For more information and to register online, go to the Hockey FIT website at www.hockeyfansintraining.org. There is a lot of information on the website, but other options for more information or to sign up are to send an e-mail to hfit@uwo.ca or to call Dr. Riggin at 519-661-2111 Ext. 22124.