This year — 2015 — sees the second year of Change4Life and the first time that the charity has teamed up with Disney. The new campaign seeks to encourage children to undertake 10 minute bursts of moderate to vigorous activity during the day. This is to meet the recommended 60 minutes of physical activity per week that children are said to need. To help promote the activities, various exercises based on different Disney characters have been devised. One example is the ‘10 Minute Shake Up’ game. This exercise regime enables children to join one of four teams based on ‘Frozen’, ‘Toy Story’, ‘Monsters’ and ‘Big Hero 6′. The idea is that teams compete with each other to do the most number of ‘shake ups’ per day.
The associated report has come from the British Heart Foundation (BHF) and scientists based at the Universities of Oxford and Loughborough University. The report shows the benefits from physical activity on children. Exercise is said to be key to physical, social and emotional development. This includes increased confidence and self-esteem. Such exercise regimes also help to redress the rise in obesity. Childhood obesity rates in the U.K. are edging towards 20 percent.
The lead scientist behind the study, Professor Charlie Foster, told the U.K. government: “The positives of exercise on children’s mental wellbeing are less well known than the physical benefits. The evidence showed a strong link between physically active children and improved self-esteem, confidence, attention span and even academic achievements.”
In related health news, this time orientated towards adults, health expert Brian Mohr has written in Controlled Environments that the idea of the work-life balance should be reviewed. Here Mohr argues that the key to happiness is doing a job for environment, rather than seeking to balance time and work and time at home. Simply ‘living for the weekend’, he stresses, is counter-productive.
“Most importantly of all is aligning the right people with the right role,” Mohr notes in his article. “That means aligning the purpose and values of an organization to the purpose and values of the right people. Everyone owes it to themselves to find the right organization.”
