SavannahPruittHawkenProjects2021

Describe your group dynamics. How has working as a group helped or hindered your project?: My group project has 3 group members. Going into the project, we all had the goal to tackle a specific part of our project. In the very beginning, that is what we did. My job was to tackle fitness, but we soon realized that separating the project into 3 different parts and addressing them individually would not provide us with the best understanding. Since the first few days consisted of us addressing the three different parts individually, we allowed ourselves to do most of the planning and baseline research individually. We eventually transitioned to all decisions being made together. We also conducted all the interviews together (except for a couple of nutrition interviews that happened in the first 2 days of the project). One aspect that helped my project, was my friendship with the other group members. We all got along very well, which made communication very simple. This also made us all fe...

What has been a challenge for you? How did you overcome that challenge or how do you think you will overcome it?: One of the most challenging parts of this project is figuring out our schedule. As we visit so many different fitness places and studios we need to take into consideration giving our bodies time for rest. As I have my fitness schedule I need to follow for my college soccer packet, I needed to know when to just sit out and watch our workout classes. The worst thing for my body as we are trying to learn about them is to not overwork it. In our first week, we schedule around 3 classes and I have summer workouts 4/5 days a workweek. I immediately was met with lots of fatigue and determined I needed to talk to our mentor to go over the best ways to complete my project while keeping my body well-rested. She told me that I need a better sleep schedule along with a better understanding of when my body needs a break. I change my late nights from 4-5 hours of sleep to a steady 8 hour...

Describe something new that you learned. How did you learn it?: Over the past couple of weeks, while following our mentor we have acquired a varied skill set. The main skill we have learned is to pick choreography and songs for all the workout routines. Though this task may appear easy, it takes hours to come up with a level 2 climber routine. First, our mentor taught us how to differentiate between the 4 different levels of rise nation workouts. Level 1 consists of simple patterns and there is only one pattern per song. The level 1 classes are a maximum of 30 minutes and switch between a mid-climb and long climb. The mid-climb is the way the climbers rest in between different patterns. Level 2 can consist of 3 different patterns in one song. In the level 2 class, the climbers still change between a high and mid-climb. To add on, level 2 climbs always include one slow song where the climbers will put the climbing machine on full resistance and do an entire pattern in a squat position. ...

A big part of our project is trying to gain more experience in different types of workouts. Doing this allows us to understand what ways they best implement fitness in their lives. For example, some instructors think that strength training holds the most important within their fitness lives. When we went to (blank), we gained the perspective of Anne miller whitsoul, who focuses her sessions on full-body workouts. By attending these classes we can observe what works best for the instructor and their class structure, some classes focused heavily on motivation. In Anne's classes, she does the workouts with the rest of her class which brings in more community. She talked about the importance community has in motivating people to continue to push through their obstacles. In our rise nation classes, the instructor does some of the workouts with the class, but at the end of the session, they sweat just as much as us. They exert most of their energy verbally motivating people to keep going...

 As we waited for responses back from studios instructors to interview, we focused on people we could talk to within our community. Student-athlete interviews ultimately jump-started our entire process. On the first day, we were able to conduct 5 interviews. Our goal was to get as many perspectives as possible in order to broaden our scope of the healthy balance between health and fitness. We found that the best way to record the answers to people's questions was through audio recordings. This method helps us go back to recall what people said and gives us the ability to use exact wording and prevents miss interpretation. The first thing we ask the interviewees is "are you comfortable with us recording?" We found that this is important because it makes people feel comfortable answering in the way they please. We follow up the first question with, "Are you okay with this information being shared with your identity or would you like to be anonymous?" This question...

Overall, my group and I have received various different perspectives about the healthy balance of mindset nutrition, and fitness. Some instructors believed that the most important aspect of health was your mindset, while others believed it was nutrition. Ultimately we determined that not many people believe that strictly fitness is beneficial to our overall heat because without the other components fitness means almost nothing. My most memorable interview was with our mentor, Rasheda Grayson, who gave a fascinating story about her fitness journey. She started off by telling us about her struggle with her weight from a very early age. She told us that her weight as a middle schooler was almost 200 pounds. We asked her what made her want to make a change in her life, and she responded "I realized I wasn't comfortable in my body". She dipped heavily into the mindset piece of her journey. We learned that her struggles as a child developed the ultimate love she has for helping...

While thinking of a project, I focused on what I remembered from my experiences. As a teenager, expectations to stay healthy and constantly stay fit becomes overwhelming. This expectation motivated me to explore other people's experiences and transform them into a better mindset when approaching health and fitness. As a soccer player, my fitness level and health were always a part of my life, so going into this area of study broadens my perspective. I am Savannah Pruitt, a senior at Hawken School, and my group and I will be discovering a healthy relationship between health and fitness among teens and young adults. Our goal is to take what we have learned from our experiences and create a demonstration of how to implement fitness in our lives in a healthy way. Throughout this project, we plan to speak with student-athletes, fitness instructors, and people who just started their fitness journey. We also plan to speak with nutrients, to gain a better understanding of how food could po...