Faith & Fitness Curriculum for Catholic Schools (June 5th Presentation Highlights)

On June 5th, I was blessed with the opportunity to speak at the St. Louis Archdiocese Health & Safety Summit. My focus was (and is) this:

Can we utilize a universal faith and fitness curriculum that will strengthen the Catholic identity and the health and fitness of our students and families? And in doing so, can we improve upon the collaborative efforts currently existing in the St. Louis Archdiocese Catholic Schools?

Below I have high lighted the key takeaways from my presentation. We are currently looking for 2-3 more candidates, (1-2 grade schools, 1 high school) within the St. Louis Archdiocese to further expand the 12 Week CatholicFIT Program for the Spring semester of 2015. In the second half of my presentation, I reviewed the pilot CatholicFIT program we did in the eight Catholic schools in the NE Deanery. That is the second part of this article, if you would like to skip to that, Click Here: Spring 2014 CatholicFIT Pilot Program.

If you or your school administrator is interested in bringing this program to your school next year, please call me today at 314.477.6520 or Email Me here to schedule a meeting. Thank you for your interest in strengthening the faith, specifically your school’s Catholic identity, the families, in particular the health of each household culture, and the fitness, specifically in nutrition and movement skills of your students.

Strength in Faith, Families & Fitness: Are You CatholicFIT?

A new book has just been released called Young Catholic America: Emerging Adults, in, out of, and gone from the Church.” about a recent study and survey of young Catholic adults. I stumbled upon this article just hours before my presentation and could not help but begin my talk with these two points taken directly from an article and review in America: The National Catholic Review:

1. On the last page of Young Catholic America, the author concludes, “Committed and practicing Catholic emerging adults are people who were well formed in Catholic faith and practice as children, whose faith became personally meaningful and practiced as teenagers, and whose parents (reinforced by other supportive Catholic adults) were the primary agents cultivating that lifelong formation” (italics in original). The rest of the book maps why there may be so few of them.
2. According to this study, three factors foster increased religiosity. First, teens must have strong bonds to religiously committed and supportive family and friends. Second, beliefs must be internalized; faith ought to be a person’s most useful compass for daily decisions, despite myriad secular guides that saturate their life experiences. Third, as Aristotle noted about civic virtue, faith’s principles must be learned first and then behaviorally practiced often.

After reading these two quotes from the article, I pointed out that the words “health” or “fitness” could replace faith throughout, as a healthy approach to fitness throughout life will come, in many ways, to the family dynamic and culture that is established from early on in life. With this, our faith and fitness journey begins.

Our mission: to integrate faith and fitness into our Catholic education experience and community and share these ideas with our students and families in hopes of promoting more physical and spiritual growth and health.

Faith & Fitness

The relationship and therefore, the metaphors helping define the bridge between faith and fitness are limitless, as noted above. When a person calls to talk to me about “getting into shape”, the first step is to help this person define what it means to them to actually, “be in shape.” This explains the ultimate goal of the CatholicFIT Program. CatholicFIT people can answer these four questions:

1. What does it mean to be Catholic?
2. What does it mean to be fit?
3. Do I understand the bridge between these two answers, specifically for me at this time in my life?
4. Can I apply these principles to my habits and outlook on life?

*Every student, athlete, family or youth group member who goes through the CatholicFIT program should be able to answer these questions. Whether our goal is improved health, fitness, faith or identity, we must first define what that looks like.

Our Faith & Fitness Challenges Are Many

I reviewed a few common challenges, then also highlighted some things that are still taken too lightly.

• Faith Challenges – people are spiritual, but not religious, mass attendance is down, only 30% of adults raised Catholic are still practicing today
• Fitness Challenges – obesity rates, Type 2 diabetes among children, chronic injuries effecting younger athletes, postural and spinal problems due to increased screen time, social media and phones
• Cultural Challenges – mainstream media’s desire to constantly and continually bash the Church, new age spirituality, YouTube, social media

The Theology of the Fit Body

The evolution of the CatholicFIT idea and what I now call Fitness Theology began with deep reflection after years of personal fitness coaching experience. It is the combination of both “health coaching” and “performance coaching” that has led to my vision for developing and sharing a faith and fitness program. Each part, both the “faith” and the “fitness” are first, very separate and distinct ideas for beginning this project. The bridge and practical application of the ideas is key for long lasting benefits.

I began with an abbreviated discussion about Health Coaching, Performance Training and the Longevity Mindset (all things I coach others to understand) with a conclusion in this section about how the Catholic Church, specifically the Catechism can be used to understand these ideas.

I am a Personal Fitness Trainer and wanted to lay the groundwork for how I came up with these ideas both personally and professionally. Pictured to the right, I am talking about the Health > Fitness/Performance > Longevity Continuum we use to coach people towards their fitness goals. The following is the breakdown:

Health & Lifestyle Coaching / Wellness Programs

Current coaching models are continually becoming saturated with the idea of relativism at its core. People are searching for community, guidance and purpose, but where they are searching and what is being presented to them is not exactly Christian or Catholic, (though often unknowingly supported by faithful Catholics.) We are not judging this approach, yet we need to become aware of where people are searching for physical health and spiritual growth.

After years of experience coaching people with this approach, I began to question where people were originally developing their beliefs and values. After one particular experience, I came up with a few new questions that began my faith and fitness project:

1. Can I learn about and eventually share my Catholic faith through the prism of health and fitness? (and vice versa?)
2. Can I learn, but more importantly, articulate a real and practical connection between faith and fitness?

Fitness & Performance Training

I offered a brief overview of what the goals of fitness and performance training are.

• Fitness is defined as the ability to perform a task.
• Performing said task requires the development of specific fitness attributes including “speed, strength, balance, agility, endurance, etc.”
• The key for my clients, for our students and all people is to improve movement quality (skills) and physical literacy (body awareness + body coordination.)
• Every human should be able to perform general maintenance on themselves. We talked about moving away from the 2oth century reactive model of medicine and personal health care that is still too prevalent today.
• There are 10 “Natural Human Movements” we can learn to fully express what the body is capable of doing. These movements were once required to work, play and survive, but now that this is possible sitting at a desk chair, our body is not be used as God intended.

Longevity Training & Awareness

• This is the awareness that personal fitness, like our faith, is a lifelong journey. This is a mindset that blankets all that we do.
• We should be aware of what stage of life we are in. Our fitness goals should correlate to our stage in life.
• Our life has purpose, it has meaning.

Fitness Theology 101 (Excerpt)

God did a really good job (perfect really) making us, creating our food and providing us with the intuition, and guidance necessary to live a happy, healthy and fulfilling life. The more we mess with it, the more we deny it, the more we choose to ignore it, the more problems we have.

The Unity Principle

This is the first reference to the Catholic Catechism – specifically CCC #364: The Unity Principle. I think when people think of “mind, body and soul”, we think of the wellness industry or the yoga studio down the street. But, how cool is it that the Catholic Catechism discusses this in detail about how “Man, though made of body and soul, is unity.”

Does every student know this is in the Catholic handbook? If we are at all concerned about the health and fitness of our children, then this is an absolute mus to teach. I posted the picture to the right which is my interpretation of the Unity Principle.

Spiritual versus Physical Health

I defined these terms and basically noted that it seems the same things in life compromising our physical health, (notably our stress, relationships, food, lack of exercise, busy-ness, dis-ease, sleep habits and worries about our reputation and ego) are also effecting our spiritual health.

Faith & Fitness in our Schools

To illustrate the urgent need for such a curriculum in our schools, I pointed to three things:

First, the National Standards and Benchmarks for Effective Catholic Elementary and Secondary Schools (published by Loyola University) is a booklet sitting in every Catholic school’s principle’s office. It is a vision set forth by many leaders in Catholic education though practical application at the classroom level is challenging. I’d like to think, at least in the context of PE and Health, the CatholicFIT program is exactly what this vision looks like in action! This program specifically takes these ideas and puts them to practice. I asked everyone in the room whether they had heard of this and pulled one key quote out of the booklet:

Catholic school teachers will use Catholic identity reflection and content to help teach their subject.

This is easier said than done, especially in subjects like math, but for P.E.? Let’s get CatholicFIT already.

Secondly, I pointed to a February 17th article from the St. Louis Archdiocese Review about a “Catholic identity” assessment completed by the Catholic Education Center and they concluded, among a few other things the following:

” … emphasize the need to use the “Catechism of the Catholic Church in all subject areas, not just religion.”

Again, the CatholicFIT Program does just that! Woo hoo! Now I am getting excited.

Finally, I wanted to offer my personal perspective as a Catholic school parent and that of a professional working with the Catholic Schools. I offered four more reasons why the CatholicFIT Program could be pretty awesome for our students and families along with the pro’s of expanding the program:

1. The continuing integration of faith and fitness education is an absolute must. It is now more important than ever to find and nurture ways to associate what it means in practical terms (in 2014) to be a person of faith and a fit person.
2. Collaboration between schools and teachers – can we expand the “universal” theme of the Catholic Church and develop more communication and collaboration within our community. Our resources our endless, yet we are not utilizing them to our full potential. A few people (teachers and nurses) in the audience expressed their disappointment with the seeming lack of such collaboration.
3. Collaboration with working professionals – I likened my training meetings with the P.E. Instructors the same as accountants meeting with math teachers to develop curriculum for every day skills and lifelong, practical knowledge. I believe the future and success of education will involve more professional collaboration, internships and hands on experience for students.
4. Formalizing fitness education – more and more health and fitness principles are becoming universally accepted, so we are closer to being able to teach specific movement skills that will benefit our students for life. Exercise is more about quality than quantity, but we still continue to promote quantity. Can Catholic schools innovate this approach and lead the way towards this much needed paradigm shift in how we teaching physical literacy and fitness?

Working on your genuflect, with a twist (pictured here) or not, is a great way to improve your balance and strength at any age

The second half of the presentation was about the CatholicFIT Exercises and the Spring, 2014 CatholicFIT Pilot Program done in the eight NE Deanery Federation Catholic Schools. Click here to go to Part 2 of this article and check out what we did with survey results for the program.

Pictured right is me with my two nephews performing a Lunging Pattern (Genuflect) which is one of the 10 Fundamental Human Movements taught in the CatholicFIT Program. In this case, the students learned about when to genuflect, along with how important this exercise to develop strength, balance and durability for sports and life.

For more about the Pilot Program, Click Here.

Finally, this program was not possible without the help of the pastors, principles and teachers of the eight schools we worked. This program will not succeed without your help. If you are interested in bringing this to your school, please email me or call me at 314.477.6520 to talk about the next required step to making that happen. God bless!