Report- Carlos Canales. Participante oficial del proyecto From Movement to Improvement

SUMMARY
Promotion of healthy lifestyle amongst youth
For young workers who aim to make a positive impact.
8 working days.
24 youthworkers from 8 countries (Czech Republic, Spain, Poland, Romania, Turkey, Germany and Estonia)

OBJECTIVES

By implementing the project we want to provide youth workers with:
Basic rules of healthy exercising and nutrition skills.
Knowledge, skills, and attitudes to promote physical activity amongst youth.
Higher awareness of consequences of an unhealthy lifestyle.
Ability to develop teamwork, leadership, discipline, and other skills and values in youngsters through various physical activities.
Opportunities to involve youngsters with fewer opportunities in social life through sport.

TRAINERS

Jan Chlapek
Jan works as a Physical Education Teacher and Condition trainer. With his colleagues, he runs Sport Training Centre located in Brno. His main field of interest is proper nutrition.

Vojtech Stursa
Vojta works as a Physical education teacher and he is a professional sports masseur. His main field of interest is recovery and mental health.
Both trainers graduated with Master’s degree from Sport University in the Czech Republic. They both have long international experience in involving youth in various events and activities.

Ondrej Podlesak
Ondrej will settle all organizational needs our participants may have. He has project management experience both from business and NGO, who hosts this training course.

The activities we did:

• Getting to know each other; Through different games and activities we were breaking the ice between us and our cultures. Talking about lifestyle differences and how some things work in each of the countries.
• We were creating some posts and thoughts about what were about to life for the next days, regarding the things we were about to learn and to do. Also, in contributions, from my side I offered myself to deliver gymnastics workshops related to Acro yoga and Acro sport based on the sessions that I already had at the school during the last part of the year.
• The theorical part were more focus in nutritionist trendy tools like diets, alimentary strategies, and alternatives way to improve our immune system. We were having long debates about their benefits and risk, and how to become more critical about them.
• We learnt about different diets;
  – The Paleo Diet: Emphasizes whole foods but bans grains and dairy. Its multiple health benefits include weight loss.
  – The Vegan Diet: Exclude all animal products. They may cause weight loss due to lower calorie intake while reducing your risk of several diseases.
  – Low-Carb Diets: Severely limit carb intake and push your body to use fat for fuel. They aid weight loss and are linked to many other health benefits.
  – The Dukan Diet: Has not been tested in quality human studies. The diet may cause weight loss, but it also may slow down your metabolism and make you lose muscle mass along with fat mass.
  – The Ultra-Low-Fat Diet: Contains less than 10% of its calories from fat. It can cause significant weight loss but never avoiding unsaturated fat taken, only avoiding saturated for your benefits in health.
  – The Zone Diet: Studies on its weight loss benefits are inconsistent, but the diet improves many important health markers and reduces your risk of heart disease.
• We talked about some nutritional strategies like fasting;
  – Despite its recent surge in popularity, fasting is a practice that dates back centuries and plays a central role in many cultures and religions.
  – Defined as the abstinence from all or some foods or drinks for a set period of time, there are many different ways of fasting.
  – In general, most types of fasts are performed over 24–72 hours.
  – Intermittent fasting, on the other hand, involves cycling between periods of eating and fasting, ranging from a few hours to a few days at a time.
  – Fasting has been shown to have many health benefits, from increased weight loss to better brain function

The practical learning was more focus in exercise through different kinds of sports or games, these ones were focus on strength, endurance, flexibility, coordination, etc. New technologies are always coming to Sport and Healthy fields, so we were practicing reaction speed time with this new tool based on turn on / off lights.

We had also the opportunitty to train un a CrossFit box, and practice this trendy sport, that is spreding worldwild.
CrossFit workouts are based on the principles of high intensity interval training. This is where you perform a series of exercises with little to no rest in between. It is not until you have completed the repetitions for every exercise one time that you can take a breather.

We took advantage of the good weather and every day we could do some stretching as well;

We had the opportunity to play different sports and games, some of them were with normal rules or some were adapted to less competitive point of view.

My personal contribution was Acro yoga and Acro sport
Roles
Base: Plant your roots, stay strong yet flexible, and see yourself as a pillar of support, knowing you have all the abundance you need from above and below.
Flyer: Visualize yourself as light as a feather, spread your wings, and fly free, enveloped in a loving and supportive embrace.
For both roles;
The core muscles can often elude us during static postures when practicing individually.
Utilizes your whole body in varying planes of motions and points of balance.
It helps build relationships.
Proprioception, or the awareness of your body moving through space, takes practice

We had also the opportunity to visit Brno and other cities close to the project location;

After the project, I have had the opportunity to met again with the Polish Team in Warsaw, to see each other and discuss about future common projects related to sport, thanks to the project in Mutenice.

This is a small summary about this incredible experience that I could have lived