Fitness for Life is a comprehensive K-12 program designed to help students take responsibility for their own activity, fitness, and health and to prepare them to be physically active and healthy throughout their adult lives. This standards-based program has been carefully articulated following a pedagogically sound scope and sequence to enhance student learning and progress.
The Fitness for Life program includes three sets of coordinated resources:
- Fitness for Life: Elementary School: A K-6 nutrition, physical activity, and wellness program
- Fitness for Life: Middle School: A personal fitness text for middle-school students
- Fitness for Life (high school): The nations first personal fitness textbook for teens, now in its updated fifth edition
The K-6 program, Fitness for Life: Elementary School, is an innovative multimedia program that facilitates total school involvement by using physical education lessons, classroom activities and discussions, recess, before- and afterschool activities, family nights, and more to deliver appropriate physical activity and promote health-related fitness and active lifestyles. The program features more than 16 hours of video content on DVDs as well as classroom guides for each grade level, a lesson plan book with a resources CD-ROM and an audio CD, and a guide for wellness coordinators.
The Fitness for Life: Middle School text sets the stage for the high school text by continuing to instill knowledge about the benefits of a healthy, active lifestyle. The book emphasizes the importance of physical activity for all while exposing students to a variety of activities in the Physical Activity Pyramid. The program includes a student text and a teachers guide with a bound-in CD-ROM.
The high school text, Fitness for Life, Updated Fifth Edition, offers more detailed fitness and wellness concepts and focuses on self-management skills for healthy lifestyle change. Students learn to select the physical activities they enjoy and develop individualized lifetime physical activity and wellness plans that put them on the path to lifelong fitness and health. The program includes a student text and a wraparound teachers edition with bound-in electronic resources (four CD-ROMs, two DVDs, and two audio CDs).
Fitness for Life is designed to be integrated with other physical education activities to create a quality comprehensive physical education program. Fitness for Life is also fully integrated with Physical Best and Fitnessgram, sharing the same HELP philosophy. In accordance with this philosophy, Fitness for Life is designed to
- help students learn about Health-related physical fitness and the benefits of healthy lifestyles, including participation in regular physical activity and sound nutrition;
- involve Everyone, not just students who have special physical talents;
- feature activities that can be used for a Lifetime, including those that get students active now, both in and out of school; and
- help students find activities and plan activity programs that are Personal and appropriate to their individual needs.
Fitness for Life is pedagogically sound, built on National Association for Sport and Physical Education (NASPE) standards as well as standards that integrate the text with other subject matter areas.
For more information about each level of the comprehensive K-12 Fitness for Life program, click on the appropriate links displayed on this page. In each section youll find complete information about the resources, supporting content for implementing the program at each level, and resources to help you advocate for implementing quality, health-related fitness education programs in your K-12 physical education curriculum.