The ultimate goal of teaching sport is to promote healthy and active lifestyles for your students. To do this effectively, you must introduce a healthy way of life early on in your activities.
Promoting active and healthy lifestyles is easy; it only gets difficult when you try to persuade your students to actually lead a healthy life. You should have the full trust of your students, and as long as you do, then your students are more likely to follow your example and your lead into an active life.
Your students can start a more active life in many different ways. A simple way to start is by walking to your activity, or school, rather than drive. This may not be possible for some people; they may not be within walking distance. However, they can still walk part way. They could get off the bus a few stops early, or could be dropped off 10-15 minutes from where they need to go and walk the rest of the way.
There are other ways in which your students can lead an active life when they are not partaking in sport. For example, they can take the stairs instead of taking a lift. Even if they have to ascend many floors, they could take the lift to a couple of floors below and walk up the rest of the way. There are always ways in which students can be active, even when they are not taking part in sporting activities.
Your activities are also important for promoting active lifestyles. If your students have fun whilst participating in sports with you, they are far more likely to continue playing sports outside of their activity time with you. This is why your activities are so important. You need to keep your time with your students fun and interesting.
Within your time with your students, you must also bring up leading a healthy lifestyle. Of course, this does have some similarities with leading an active life, however it encompasses much more than this. It is all about being active with and without sports, but you also have to encourage healthy eating alongside that.
This is best brought up in classroom lessons, or if this isn’t possible, at the end of your activities. After you finish playing sport, you can bring up healthy eating by explaining that eating nutritionally can make them better at sports. This is the worse case scenario, and it is far better to speak about it in an in-class lesson as you can encourage discussions and spend more time educating them on the subject.
Eating healthily is not just about eating salads and fruits; it is about eating the right amount of all foods. For example, you can eat a healthy amount of fatty foods as well as high carbohydrates and dairy products.This is an area that you need to discuss in depth about because it is not common knowledge. You need your students to understand that all types of nutrients are needed for a healthy diet.
