Great Arkansas Workout expands

People with the power to load fourth-graders into buses and ferry them hither and yon for educational enrichment still have time to sign up for the annual Great Arkansas Workout.

The Arkansas Governor’s Council on Fitness is expanding its 22-year-old field day of fitness games for schoolchildren, offering a Northwest Arkansas workout in Bentonville from 8:45 a.m.

to 11:30 p.m. April 25 and a central Arkansas event in Conway from 9 a.m. to noon April 29.

“We’re just trying to get as many schools involved this year as we can,” says Rance Bryant, “and trying to re-energize this program” which hasn’t been offered in central Arkansas since 2009.

Bryant, director of the Conway Regional Health & Fitness Center and a member of the council, says Conway’s workout will use the University of Central Arkansas track and field complex.

He says 12 schools from Conway and surrounding communities have signed on, but there’s room for many more fourth-graders at UCA. Any school is welcome, he says.

“It’s an activity for the fourth-graders in the state, all over,” he says. “We’re just getting kids active and trying to get schools in the state involved.”

The plan for the workout in Conway involves circuits, obstacle courses, team events and sporty drills. Activities will be led by volunteers with the council as well as Conway Regional’s personal trainers and group fitness instructors. “Hip-hop dance, obstacle course, relay events, combine drills, dribbling soccer drills - those are some of the stations involved,” he says. And there will be rest breaks.

To register for the central Arkansas workout, teachers and principals can use the Internet form at surveymonkey.

com/s/9CXTXML.

NORTHWEST WORKOUT

Physical therapist Chris Cothern moved the fourth-graders’ workout to Springdale in 2010 after conducting it in Little Rock the year before.

Cothern owns AthletePlus Physical Therapy & Spine. While he’s still the council’s point man for the Northwest workout, he says the real organizers are its hosts, Barbara O’Connor and Megan Hughey of the Walton Fitness Center, 1701 S.E. 14th St. in Bentonville.

Hughey says there’s room for more schools to register for the circuit-style workout that’s designed to expose fourth-graders to activities they might not otherwise get to try.

“Each school will be assigned to a station where they’ll do 10 to 15 minutes of a variety of physical activities,” she says. “Some things we have in mind are Zumba, and we have a bouldering wall, and different sports like baseball and soccer, yoga.”

Schools can apply at surveymonkey.com/s/WHR-5RPD.

WAY BACK

Fourth-graders are typically 9 to 10 years old. So the children who attended the first Great Arkansas Workout in May 1992 - when David Bazzel was chairman of the then-Arkansas Governor’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports - should be about 32 years old.

According to reports in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s archives, that first workout lasted just 1 ½ hours, and yet volunteer trainers and coaches led more than 100 children through about 20 activities on the lawn and steps of the state Capitol.

After then Secretary of State Bill McCuen blew a whistle, the children jogged to warm up before splitting into small groups to visit stations for brief samples of activities such as aerobics, archery, basketball, bocce, bowling, cycling, fencing, gymnastics, powerlifting, figure skating, ice hockey, taekwondo, tennis, soccer, swimming, jumprope and volleyball.

Bazzel was in Washington that day to attend the third annual Great American Workout on the lawn of the White House with Arnold Schwarzenegger.

So that first children’s workout was coordinated by council member Lydia Robertson and staff member Gary Parrell.

More information about this year’s events is on the council’s newly redesigned website, agcof.com, and its Facebook page, “Arkansas Governor’s Council on Fitness.”

ActiveStyle, Pages 27 on 04/07/2014

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