SAN ANTONIO – The need to maintain a healthy lifestyle hasn’t dissipated during the Covid-19 pandemic and local nonprofit San Antonio Sports launched its ‘Stay Active. Stay Healthy’ initiative to help the community stay fit by providing free resources and promoting wellness. San Antonio Sports’ Director of Youth and Community Programs, Mandy Adkins, said the organization wanted to find a way to channel fitness to families sheltering at home.

“Once Covid-19 happened and things started shutting down and social distancing came into play, we realized the need for physical activity doesn’t go away,” Adkins said. “And we just had to rethink, ‘How do we offer that opportunity to families but from the comfort of their own home?’ That’s how we decided to provide the resources that we have online to hopefully still offer those opportunities to families to get them active together.”

The program encompasses the ‘Fit Family Challenge Home Edition’ which includes a 12-week fitness challenge from Alpha Warrior and live streaming Zumba classes with the combined programming receiving just north of 7,000 views in the two months after launching. A portal of free online health and wellness resources as well as ‘i play! afterschool at home’ – sports-specific videos for grade school-aged children – round out the offerings for the campaign. 

“We’re actually offering more programming online than we would have been able to offer traditionally during the summer. The ‘i play! at home’ is a totally new concept we’ve never offered anything through ‘i play’ virtually,” said Adkins. 

Kendra Chambers, a professional USA track & field athlete, 2021 Olympic hopeful and San Antonio Sports partner said the programming geared towards sports is vital to the participation of youth athletes.

“I think the biggest thing for most people who are working out is like ‘What do I do?’ So it’s all nice and dandy to want to work out but then what? San Antonio Sports has been making it easy, especially for kids,” Chambers said. “To use a resource that’s going to be able to cater to the sport that they love and with such young minds, that’s important to cater to what they want to do.”

All of the ‘Stay Active. Stay Healthy’ resources are located on the San Antonio Sports website with the possibility that an online wellness component will be a permanent part of the online curriculum.

“Even now as gyms are starting to open back up, some families still might not feel comfortable going to a gym or might still need the opportunity to do fitness at home and so our goal is to weave that virtual component into our everyday programming,” said Adkins.

For more, visit: https://sanantoniosports.org/