Did you know that the recommended amount of physical activity for anyone is 150 minutes a week? Here at Ashland University, in a survey taken in 2018, only about 25 percent of students are getting that recommended amount weekly.

To fix that, Campus Wellness and Rec Services are partnering up to bring students the “Move Your Way” program. This program was created to help students increase and track their weekly physical activity.
It doesn’t matter what kind of physical activity; the point is to just keep moving and remain active.

The program highlights 4 important benefits including; boosting your mood, sharpening focus, reducing stress and improving sleep. All things that are important to college students especially.

Campus wellness offered this program as a competition for employees in the fall and found great success with it. So, why not try it with the college students that aren’t getting the recommended amount of activity?

Director of Campus Wellness, Deborah Sullivan says, “we read an article about the University of Maryland promoting the campaign on their campus and the success they had, so we thought – why not?”

The campus wellness team is doing this program out of a passion for wellness, and the benefits that physical activity has on the well being of everyone. The program offers the ability of tracking your physical activity as well, and the first ten people that sign up will be contacted to sign up for fitness assessments.

These fitness assessments will be done by the exercise faculty and students, who will be holding pre and post fitness assessments to help students.

Alexa Jacobs, President of Campus Wellness and the peer educators says, “I personally just want to see an increase of physical activity across every student here at Ashland, I hope to see a change in a lot of students lifestyles as well.”

Registration for the program ends on Feb. 12, and the program officially starts on Feb. 16. The challenge will last five weeks through March 29, but students are encouraged to keep up their physical activity after the five weeks are up. Make sure that you sign up, so that you can be one of the ten people to receive the benefit of fitness assessments.

Students can sign up on the campus wellness website by following the link below and looking under the Move Your Way Challenge headline, this will lead them to a sign-up sheet. The goal is to make sure that you fill out if students have reached 150 minutes in that given week.
https://www.ashland.edu/student-affairs/health-safety-title-ix/campus-wellness