NEWMAN YMCA’S SHOOTING STARS SCHOOL OF DANCE WINS BIG

THE STUDIO TOOK HOME VARIOUS OVERALL & HIGH SCORE AWARDS

SPRINGFIELD, MA – February 15, 2020 – The Newman YMCA’s Shooting Stars School of Dance enjoyed their second optional solo competition of the season at Breakout Regional Dance Competition in Springfield, Massachusetts on February 15 and 16, taking home several high score winnings.

Junior soloist, Delainey Pari, finished the night with an opening number invitation, an “Outstanding Emotional Execution Award,” a Platinum Plus score, first overall in the Jazz category for her age, and 5th overall Junior advanced soloist.

11th-year student and current senior soloist, Sydney Mello, scored two Platinum awards and 4th overall Senior advanced soloist, against fierce competitors. While teen soloist Delaney Kotch finished up with a Platinum score and 8th overall teen soloist.

Several other students rounded out the weekend with Platinum scores and special awards such as the “Silky Smooth Special Award”, and the “Star Quality Award”.

“I am extremely proud of the students who attended this competition, as this was an optional competition for our soloists, and these dancers remain consistently dedicated to getting on the stage as much as possible,” said Ashlee Bourque-Tinkham, Director of Shooting Stars School of Dance. “We have many more competitions to attend this season and we are off to a fabulous start, thanks to the dedication of all of our dancers,” said Bourque-Tinkham.

Shooting Stars will be attending five more competitive events between February through July. Learn more about upcoming events, or how to register your child for dance lessons by visiting the Shooting Stars Facebook page.

About the Newman YMCA

The Y is one of the nation’s leading nonprofits strengthening communities through youth development, healthy living and social responsibility with a mission of nurturing the potential of children and families, improving the nation’s health and well-being, and providing opportunities to give back and support neighbors. The Y has the long-standing relationships and physical presence not just to promise, but also deliver, lasting personal and social change. Learn more at https://ymcagreaterprovidence.org.

Connect with the YMCA of Greater Providence on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn.

BAYSIDE STINGRAYS WIN 5TH NEW ENGLAND SENECY CHAMPIONSHIP

TEAM ADVANCES TO NATIONALS IN NORTH CAROLINA

BOSTON, MA – March 1, 2020 – The Bayside Family YMCA Stingray swim team clinched their 5th consecutive regional title at the Southern New England YMCA Championships this weekend at Boston University’s Fitness and Recreational Center.

The three-day competition drew over 1500 swimmers ranging from ages six to eighteen from Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. The Bayside YMCA Stingrays took the overall team championship by 900 points bringing several record-breaking moments and new qualifications.

Leading the team to victory were swim coach veterans Jen and Ray Baker along with a stellar coaching staff of seven. “We can’t say enough how proud we are,” said Ray Baker. “They came to race from the youngest to oldest. Our younger swimmers come with so much energy and excitement,” Baker said. “The older swimmers performed exceptionally well even after winning states the night before. They are all incredible athletes,” said Baker.

The Bayside Stingrays came out on top across all age groups in both boys and girls. 8 and under boys and girls placed 2nd overall with only seven boys competing. The 9 and 10 boys and girls also placed 2nd. This was followed by a strong session from the 11 and 12 age group for boys and girls taking first place. 13 and 14 took second in both categories, and holding the top spot were the 15-18-year-olds placing first.

Despite being unrested, both Stingray boys’ and girls’ teams churned their way to SENECY titles with a host of individual meet records and personal-best performances.

Kristen Baker, a freshman at Barrington High School broke the 13 and 14 girls 100 back record (1:02.40) previously held by her sister. Garin Stone, Barrington High School sophomore broke the girls’ 15-18 100 fly record (59:37) by two seconds and Juliana Goncalves, senior at Bayview High School broke the 15-18 girls 200 IM record (2:13.44) that stood since 1984.

Girls’ 15-18 200 Medley relay (1:50.70) shattered the previous team and SENECY records consisting of Baker, Goncalves, Stone, Barrington High School sophomore, and Zoe Webster, Barrington High School freshman, qualifying for the YMCA Nationals in Greensboro, North Carolina in April. This dynamic team along with DiGiacomo also broke the team record for the 200 free relay (1:41.48) by almost one second. Stone set a new SENECY record with her 100 fly.

Boys’ 15-18 also finished on top breaking the 200 Medley relay (1:37.41) team and SENECY records. Seniors, Yanis Benadouda, Andrew Barton, Blake Anderson, and freshman William McClelland qualified for YMCA Nationals as a result.

“This has been an incredible experience,” said Andrew Barton, Barrington High School senior. “The coaches have been so supportive in helping us excel in and out of the pool,” Barton said.

Next, 52 members of the Stingray team will compete at the New England Championships at MIT on March 24 with eight swimmers qualifying for Nationals in Greensboro, North Carolina in April.

About the Bayside YMCA

The Y is one of the nation’s leading nonprofits strengthening communities through youth development, healthy living and social responsibility with a mission of nurturing the potential of children and families, improving the nation’s health and well-being, and providing opportunities to give back and support neighbors. The Y has the long-standing relationships and physical presence not just to promise, but also deliver, lasting personal and social change. Learn more at https://ymcagreaterprovidence.org.

Connect with the YMCA of Greater Providence on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn.

We are a relationship organization. We bring people together – large numbers of them, from all backgrounds and circumstances – and create personal connections. Our proximity to people and communities is an organizational asset, but the nature of this virus, and how it spreads, presents significant challenges in today’s environment.

To protect your well-being and the health of our employees, Kevin Washington, President of Y-USA, in partnership with health and community leaders, has urged all Y’s to close their facilities and explore alternative ways to meet the needs of our communities during this time of crisis.

Today, Governor Raimondo is requesting all childcare and preschool programs to close. As a result, all YMCA of Greater Providence locations will be suspending ALL business operations including exercise classes, swim lessons, youth sports, and all other programs as of 5:00 pm today through Sunday, March 29th.

Y employees are the heart of our organization and we’re committed to taking care of our team, which is why we’re asking all staff members to remain home with loved ones. Staff will be available to answer phone lines from 9:00 am – 4:00 pm, should questions arise.

Additionally, stay up-to-date on developments by opting in to your local Y’s Emergency Text Alert Program. Opt-in information is provided below. Timely information will also be shared via your favorite social media page.

While our facilities are closed, cleaning crews will continue to use revolutionary Protexus electrostatic touches sprayers to disinfect and sanitize all areas more efficiently and effectively than ever before, so that you can come back and exercise with confidence. Additionally, the installation of new, state-of-the-art, cardio equipment will go on as planned.

We have an organizational responsibility to do everything in our power to prevent the spread of this virus. Thank you for your understanding. Be well.

Steven G. O’Donnell
Chief Executive Officer
YMCA of Greater Providence

HOW DOES YOUR FITNESS MEASURE UP?

IF YOU FEEL LIKE YOU HIT A FITNESS PLATEAU DURING LOCKDOWN THESE FOUR NEW FITNESS TESTS WILL HELP YOU ASSESS EXACTLY WHERE YOU’RE ARE. IN JUST A FEW MINUTES, YOU CAN TEST YOUR FITNESS AND GET ON TRACK TO RECORD NEW SUCCESSES.

Benchmarking your fitness and monitoring your progress can be one of the best ways to stay on track with your training. When you assess different aspects of your fitness, it helps you find where to focus your energy, chase new achievements, and keep your motivation at an all-time high.

Dr. Jinger Gottschall, a research scientist and science advisor for the American Council on Exercise, suggests four, simple fitness tests that make it easy to assess your fitness and strength and track your successes.

Follow these directions and in just a few minutes you can assess your cardio fitness, upper and lower body strength, core strength and endurance. You can download the details of each fitness test, guidance on what results you should aim for, and record your progress here:

CARDIOVASCULAR AEROBIC FITNESS

There are many ways to assess cardiovascular fitness, but one of the most straight forward has to be the one-mile walking test. All you need to do is find a one-mile flat walking track or neighborhood route and record the time it takes for you to walk the distance. You can slow down and speed up as you wish, but the goal is to complete the mile as quickly as possible.

Workouts like BODYCOMBAT™ is a great class to build aerobic fitness. And if you really want to take it to the next level, LES MILLS GRIT™ is the ultimate. Find a class today.

UPPER BODY STRENGTH

Research shows the simple push-up is one of the most effective functional training options for the pecs, deltoids, and triceps while also strengthening the muscles of the core. To perform the push-up test, you complete as many push-ups as you can without stopping; either on your knees or your toes. For each full-range repetition, bring your elbows to a 90 degree angle. If you want to lift your push-up game, read all you need to know about push-ups, learn how to become a toe push-up pro in 16 days and find out three common push-up mistakes.

BODYPUMP™ provides great resistance training for your chest, upper back, and shoulders, or try BODYCOMBAT, which builds phenomenal upper body strength without any weights or equipment.  Find a class today or try Les Mills OnDemand for free.

LOWER BODY STRENGTH

The leg wall sit test is a great way to assess lower body strength, specifically in the glutes, quads, and hamstrings. And the single leg version takes into account any difference between your legs. Simply start with your feet shoulder-width apart and your back against a smooth vertical wall. Slowly slide your back down the wall until both your knees and hips are at a 90-degree angle. Lift one leg off the ground and start the timer. When you can no longer keep that leg off the ground, stop the timer. After a period of rest, test your other leg. If you’re keen to build lower body strength, there are two fundamental exercises you need to master – learn all you need to know about the squat and the lunge.

CORE STRENGTH AND ENDURANCE

Research shows that your front, back and side core muscles are all active in a hover or plank position, compared to isolated core exercises such as crunches or oblique twists. For this reason the hover (forearm plank) test is a great way to assess your core strength and endurance. You simply need to stack your shoulders over your elbows and hold your body in a perfectly straight line for as long as possible. If you can hold this basic hover with an unwavering form for over a minute you can consider adding dynamic instability to take core activation to new heights. Find out the difference between the hover and the plank and why the hover is superior.

Get round-the-clock access to LES MILLS workouts at LES MILLS On Demand or find a class near you.

This piece originally appeared at lesmills.com.

DOES DNA REALLY DICTATE YOUR FITNESS RESULTS?

DO GENES INFLUENCE YOUR TRAINING RESULTS? HOW DOES EXERCISE IMPROVE EYESIGHT? WHAT ANTI-AGING SECRET LIES IN OUR BONES? AND, WHAT CAN WEIGHT-LIFTING MONKEYS TELL US ABOUT OUR NERVOUS SYSTEM? ALL IS REVEALED IN THIS MONTH’S RESEARCH ROUNDUP.

TESTING WITH TWINS TELLS US YOU CAN’T PIN PERFORMANCE ON GENETICS

We know there’s no single winning formula for fitness. Some of us can transform strength and fitness with just a few weeks of exercise, others follow the exact same routine and see less dramatic results. Such idiosyncrasies have often been pinned on individual genetics, but a fascinating new study of twins suggests DNA has little influence on our response to exercise. Australian scientists recruited 42 sets of young, healthy, and sedentary twins (30 pairs were identical and 12 fraternal) assessing their endurance and leg strength before starting them on two three-month exercise stints. One stint involved 60 minutes of running or cycling three times a week. The other, 60 minutes of weight training three times a week. At the end of each three-month session, researchers reassessed participants’ aerobic fitness and muscle power. While most participants saw positive gains, the results varied greatly and even identical twins saw remarkably differing outcomes – suggesting results are not genetically-dependent.

What the scientists found particularly interesting was that if one of the participants responded poorly to the endurance training, they seemed to get increased benefit from the strength training, and vice versa. This shows that not everyone reacts to exercise in the same way, but there is an optimal exercise strategy for everyone.

THE ANTI-AGING SECRET THAT LIES IN OUR BONES

Research into bone health and anti-aging provides more evidence that exercise could be key to maintaining muscle and brain health as time ticks by. It all comes down to a magical protein called osteocalcin, which is abundant in our bones. Gerard Karsenty has studied osteocalcin since the 1990s, conducting a series of experiments identifying how osteocalcin reverses age-related ailments. He has also found that osteocalcin increases the ability to produce the molecule ATP, the fuel that allows us to exercise. Regular exercise stimulates the production of more osteocalcin in our bones, which is secreted by osteoblasts (the cells that synthesize bone). “We know that people who are very active tend to have less of a cognitive decline with age than sedentary people,” says Karsenty. “With time, maybe people will be more aware of this connection, and think of their bone health as being just as important as other aspects of staying healthy.”

COULD SQUATS AND STAR JUMPS SLOW VISION LOSS?

Macular degeneration is one of the most prevalent causes of vision loss. It is estimated that about 10 million Americans suffer from the issue, so it’s no surprise that researchers have long been exploring how to alleviate it. Past studies have linked a healthy lifestyle with healthy vision, however, these have been based on self-reporting. Now, for the first time, researchers have hard evidence from the lab – albeit using mice. Scientists from the University of Virginia School of Medicine have found that exercise can reduce the overgrowth of harmful blood vessels in the eyes by up to 45 percent. An important reduction, as when these blood vessels get overgrown and tangled, issues occur such as macular degeneration, glaucoma and diabetic retinopathy. While the study didn’t delve into the exact type of exercise that will benefit your vision (directing mice to do anything other than cardio training on a spinning wheel would be difficult), it did highlight that the beneficial effects could be seen after just a very small dose of physical activity. The scientists aren’t certain exactly how exercise is preventing the blood vessel overgrowth, saying there could be a variety of factors at play, including increased blood flow to the eyes.

LIFTING WEIGHTS STRENGTHENS YOUR NERVOUS SYSTEM FIRST, THEN YOUR MUSCLES

Thanks to weight lifting monkeys we now have fascinating new insights into how your body responds to resistance exercise. These findings, which come from a new study published in The Journal of Neuroscience, detail how weight training affects the nervous system. Scientists trained monkeys to pull weighted handles each day, increasing the weight over 12 weeks. On each day they also stimulated both the corticospinal tract and the reticulospinal tract (the two major neural highways descending to the spinal cord) and measured the electrical activity in the arm muscles. They found the corticospinal tract didn’t change during strength training. It was the outputs from the reticulospinal tract that became more powerful. This study highlights the neural mechanisms that contribute to increases in strength when weight training.

CAN YOU CATCH HEART DISEASE FROM A CHAIR?

WE KNOW LONG PERIODS OF SITTING CAN BE DANGEROUS FOR OUR HEALTH – BUT SCIENTISTS NOW SAY IT ALL DEPENDS ON HOW WE SIT.

When I was growing up in the 70s, there was an ashtray in each corner of our family living room. In those days everybody smoked; in fact, my mother was advised by her GP to smoke to relieve stress. Visitors smoked, my brothers smoked, it was unusual not to have a social event that wasn’t in a haze of cigarette smoke – so we needed strategically-placed receptacles for people to dispense of their ash.

Eventually, scientists and medical researchers convinced people that smoking is a really bad idea. As a result, I haven’t seen an ashtray in years.

So after reading a recent study on the perils of sitting, I’m now wondering if chairs and sofas will be the next to go. Quite simply, sitting is the new smoking. Even if you’re a regular at the gym, long periods of sitting on a regular basis have been shown to significantly shorten your life.

How can this be? We’ve been sitting for hundreds of thousands of years – how can something so common be so bad?

The answer: it’s the WAY we sit.

To shed light on this, let’s journey back and discover how we rested in previous eras.

Only in the past 10,000 years have humans been able to source food by farming animals and raising crops. Prior to this recent history, humans spent millions of years practicing and evolving a hunter-gatherer approach to food sourcing. From an evolutionary perspective, we’re “designed” to behave in this hunter-gatherer way – like the Hadza people of Tanzania, one of the few remaining populations who still hunt every day and gather vegetables for nourishment.

These days, the Hadza have quite an audience. They are monitored, probed, and generally scrutinized by researchers desperate to discover what distinguishes their lifestyle and its health benefits from a more modern approach. As you would expect, the Hadza have substantially lower rates of “lifestyle” diseases, such as diabetes and heart disease, than we see in modern society.

To further our understanding of the ills that come with a modern lifestyle, the Hadza’s sitting patterns were also recently put under the microscope.

One would assume that adopting a hunter-gatherer approach to life would be exhausting. They must spend way more time in active food-finding pursuits compared to us modern-day sloths – and as a result, sit less. But reality does not support this assumption. The Hadza spend plenty of time sitting and resting too. In fact, their sitting duration over the course of a day is almost identical to ours.

The key difference is that the Hadza don’t use chairs; they squat or kneel. These positions require low-grade muscle activation that, despite the low intensity, has a dramatic effect.

A number of investigations have demonstrated that prolonged sitting with little to no muscle activation (like we do daily in chairs) results in the accumulation of triglycerides (fat that circulates in the blood and is a major contributor to heart disease). Whereas interrupting these positions by getting up regularly or staying in a standing position more often can result in a 32 percent reduction in triglycerides.

In fact, the low squat position (sitting your butt on your heels) used by the Hadza generates between 5 and 10 times more muscle activation than sitting in a chair. This muscle activity gently soaks up triglycerides, resulting in less fat circulating in the blood – which lessens the risk of cardiovascular disease.

Now I don’t know about you, but I can’t squat like the Hadza. I feel like my knees are going to explode and my hamstrings cramp like nothing on earth. But as a result of reading these findings, I’ve converted my desk at home (during lockdown) to a standing option. In fact, I’ve written this whole article while standing.

The fact is, exercise is great for warding off the hazards of modern life. But if you’re inactive for long periods during the day, you’re still at high risk of contracting some nasty diseases.

With this in mind, I’m hoping the plush, high-backed office chair will soon disappear like the overflowing ashtrays. Standing desks will be everywhere, and shows on Netflix will come with reminders to do a few burpees at regular intervals.

I know I’m not alone. Check out this interview with Professor David Dunstan, a world authority on the role of sedentary behavior, who shares his fascinating views on tackling chronic diseases through exercise.