Active Living Program News
RWJF Chooses ALED for Active for Life Study
The Active Living Every Day (ALED) course has been chosen by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to be one of two interventions used in their upcoming multi-million dollar grant project, Active for Life. This four-year study will test the ability of two interventions to increase physical activity in sedentary adults over the age of 50.
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is the United States’ largest foundation devoted to improving American’s health and health care. Over the four years of the project the Foundation will disperse $8.7 million to as many as 8 grantees. The National Program Office, located at the Texas A&M School of Rural Public Health, will direct the Active for Life project. Besides testing the effectiveness of the interventions, they hope to also implement and sustain the intervention programs at the project sites.
Each site will utilize one of two interventions: Active Living Every Day or Active Choices. Active Choices is a telephone-based intervention developed at Stanford University. Over the four years of the project, each site will have 1,000 participants in its program.
Active Living Every Day was chosen as the group intervention based on demonstrations of its efficacy in helping sedentary adults become and stay physically active. Active Living’s curriculum is derived from eight years of research at The Cooper Institute in Dallas, Texas, involving the groundbreaking Project ACTIVE study. This study used behavioral techniques to teach participants lifestyle skills that enabled them to change their activity behavior.
The Active Living Every Day course developed by The Cooper Institute and Human Kinetics Publishers uses a unique approach to behavior change. The center of this course is the group sessions, which feature interactive learning and group support. Sessions start with a check-in and review where the participants share their experiences from the past week and build support and community. Next, there’s facilitated discussion of the session’s lesson followed by a group activity that helps the participant apply the lesson. A home assignment builds continuity and applicability from the classroom to real life. The last elements of each session are a preview of the next week, a summary, and a participant evaluation.
The Active Living Every Day learning materials offer key support to the course’s group process. The ALED course uses flexible delivery options through its easy-to-use components. There’s a textbook, Active Living Every Day, along with a companion online study guide that supplements the textbook and a Web site that offers support to participants, as well as to facilitators as they journey through ALED. Comprehensive training is provided to sites providing ALED courses, including a Facilitator Guide, online training, and workshop.
These components work together to provide a realistic and successful lifestyle approach to helping people become physically active. Through the Active for Life project, the value of this course will be understood to a greater extent, and more Americans will come to lead more active lives.
For more information visit the Active for Life Web site at www.activeforlife.info or the Active Living Every Day Web site at www.activeliving.info.
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