The ELvis Olympics Project aims to tackle physical fitness of students in the participating school. In some of our schools we have seen the number of students with obesity problems grow, in other cases we notice that the time students spend on their laptop, tablet or PC and phones has increased, while they spend less time outside, doing physical activity. In each school we give 35 students the opportunity to work on their diets and physical fitness while having fun and being in contact with their peers in other schools and countries. This will be a mixture of students aged between 15 and 18 years old. People joining the project fall into 2 categories: Some will do sports regularly, others will not do any sports in their regular life. It will also be a mix of boys and girls. By doing this project we want to achieve the following goals: 1. Young adults are stimulated to think about and work on a healthy life-style. 2. Students are asked to research what it means to live a healthy life-style and what they need to do for that. 3. Students are put in touch with experts from their own area who educate them on the topics of healthy living and the impact of sports on body as well as mind (specialist sports physicians) 4. Students are put in touch with experts on training for the sports they are going to do. 5. Students consult peers from the Belgian school to assist them in working out a personal training and diet schedule. In every school digital tools like e.g. video will be used during training sessions. The analyses made with the help of these tools will be shared on the ELvischool website to help students in their progress and learn from each other. 6. Students participate in a competition of sports. These sports can sometimes be 'out of their comfort zone'. They compete in multi-national teams, that are similar in ability (in theory, based on the video analyses and results in training). 7. The students who participated will be ambassadors for the project in the school and will provide information on healthy living and fitness to all students in at least one year group in their school. 8. The training schedules, as well as the diet schedules will be used to make a 'school training schedule and diet schedule' and also an ELvis training- and diet schedule. We will do a 'baseline measurement' with all students involved to determine their physical condition or standard. Then we put them in touch with sports physicians and other experts and peers from the school in Belgium, who will help them make training schedules and diet plans to train for the contests they are going to be competing in. Six weeks before each contest the students who are going to participate will go into training while being monitored by their P.E. teachers making video analyses and Biology teachers helping them with their diets. The analyses and training results will be put on the website for all contestants to see and make use of. During the ELvis Olympics Contests the students will compete in 7 sports. Six of them will be known to them in advance, the seventh will be a sport or sportive activity that is typical for the region or the school organising it. These games will be recorded and analyses made so that the results can be compared and used for evaluation and our research. The results we envisage are: • Video analyses. A compilation of the video analyses sent in to the website, to make a promotion video on healthy lifestyle and the project. This video will be available on the school websites as well as (probably) our partnership website: www.elvischool.eu or Etwinning • Training schedules. The training schedules used will be compared and a 'general training schedule' for physical fitness will be produced and published. • Diets. The diets followed by all participants will be compared and a healthy diet for our students will be produced and published. • Continued dissemination: A campaign for this will be set up and a number of items produced to make this possible: press releases, leaflets with advice, etc., to keep this issue on the agendas in our schools, but also in the area around the schools. • Promo video. A couple of promotional videos / photo compilations showing what can be achieved by sticking to a healthy diet and training schedule will be produced that can be put on the school websites and ELpartnership website. We will also make promotional posters that can be put up in the participating schools.
The ELvis Olympics project had as main goals to get students to think about a healthy lifestyle and work on that by thinking about their diet and exercise habits. Unfortunately the situation around the Covid pandemic forced us to try and reach these goals in a slightly different way than anticipated. In the pandemic we did not get the chance to prepare the sytudents, as it was an enormously hectic time for teachers in every school. When we started 'normal' life again, there were a number of things to catch up on, which did not help either. We should have started the first Elvis Olympics contest in Gulpen in 2021, but that was impossible as travel was not allowed yet. The first meeting in Ihlow came at a time that we had just been allowed to travel again and the initial 6-week preparation time was no longer possible before this meeting. That was solved, in some way, by agreeing to familiarise our students with the food pyramid and by letting them do the fitness test that can be found in the annexes. As the meeting in Gulpen could only take place two weeks into the school year at Sophianum and even in the holidays in Utebo, there too it was impossible to have all the students do the tests and follow the diets we intended them to do. We agreed to do the same preparation as we did for Ihlow in all future events. It di make the project less valuable in that respect, we realise that. The diet- and training schemes that were developed before the start of the project are in the annexe. What did work, and worked brilliantly, was the fact that we had almost all ELvis Olympic Contests with the students and teacher housed in 'Olympic Villages', close to the organising schools, allowing the students to spend time at the organising schools and make use of the facilities at the schools, but also further afield, when necessary. The added benefit was, that the teachers could determine what food the students would eat and couldadjust the menus to the sports that were going to be done, thus seeing to it that the students ate healthily and appropriate to the activities. Only at Utebo was it impossible to have a 'Village' and the students stayed and ate in host families. The fact that each school chose different sports (see annexe) and one 'mystery sport' saw to it that there was a healthy mix of very competitive sports and more leisurely sports. That made it attractive for the less competitive students as well. In Ihlow (close to the North Sea) there was a stroing emphasis on water sports, in Utebo (not far from the Pyrenees) there was more empohasis on mountain sports. In the other schools the sports were more 'general', although not always familiar to all the other students. Teams were always mixed, both boys and girls and nationalities, based on qualities that differed, so that there were not 'star' teams or 'loser teams'. Every team had as much as possible equal chances. The bonding that took place inside the teams and between the teams was enormous. Every time the students came back full of stories about the wonderful time they had and the teachers came back telling how much most of the students had 'grown' in the week.