Health & Well-Being VRE102

A wide-ranging course to broaden your health and well-being knowledge! This comprehensive foundation course develops an understanding of the nature and scope of human health and wellbeing, and of the healthand fitness industry looking at subjects such as nutrition, lifestyle, preventative health, and alternative medicine. Course Structure

There are eight lessons in this course, as follows:

1. Introduction: Resources & services
2. Modern Lifestyle Problems: Motivation and maintaining interest in exercise; Food, drugs,alcohol, etc.
3. Human Nutrition: Food groups, fibre, vitamins & minerals, what to eat.
4. Healthy Eating: Nutrition for healthy people, nutrition for special groups (eg. adolescents, age groups, pregnant women etc), obesity, anorexia.
5. Stress Management: Relaxation, lifestyle, effect of body changes, drugs, & alcohol.
6. Preventative Health: Self esteem, living a balanced life, decision-making.
7. Alternative Medicine: Facts & fallacies, herbal medicine, acupressure & massage.
8. Basic First Aid: Burns, wounds, resuscitation, first aid kits, first aid courses.

Course Aims

• Describe the nature and scope of the Health and Fitness Industry
• Discuss a range of modern lifestyle problems
• Describe nutritional requirements for a well balanced diet
• Determine appropriate dietary requirements for different demographic groups.
• Describe stress management strategies for different people.
• Outline basic preventative strategies and how they can be implemented
• Evaluate the usefulness of alternative medical practices in treating and preventing illness.
• Recommend first aid practices appropriate to a range of problems.

What you will do in this Course

This course aims to develop an understanding of health and wellbeing that can be applied to design a personal fitness program. Below is a list of some activities and tasks that you will complete in this course:

• Create a resource file of health and fitness related businesses, contacts, services etc.
• Interview people to learn how they rate their health and fitness and what they do to improve/maintain them.
• Identify ways to overcome a health/fitness problem in your own life.
• Identify different food allergies and ways to deal with them.
• Identify eating and nutritional disorders and describe possible treatments.
• Explain how age, level of activity, gender and other factors affect their dietary needs.
• Explain the principle of food combining.
• List the effects of alcohol abuse.
• Explain how high self esteem is achieved, and consider positive and negative effects.
• Identify services in your area that offer natural therapies and what they entail.
• Find out what first aid courses are available in your region, and what is entailed.
• List items that should be kept in a basic first aid kit.
• Describe the procedure for dealing with a broken bone.

Sample from Course:

Stress Management

Describe stress management strategies for different people.

STRESS - body changes
When humans are under stress their bodies will respond in a way that generally works towards counteracting or overcoming the problems causing the stress, however it is possible to ignore the indications that stress is occurring, and thereby suffer from a breakdown in bodily functions. Common signs of may include:

Nervousness / edginess
Nail biting
Cold hands and feet
Muscle tension
Lack of energy/fatigue
Headaches

Humans have instinctive actions when under threat just as all animals have, commonly referred to as The flight or fight response. They will either run or fight when confronted with danger. In doing so, they burn up the stress hormones released in their bodies. People work themselves till their bodies respond with signals such as tiredness, appetite, etc. Then automatically they would react to these responses, for example by sleeping or eating.

Modern humans suffer physical arousal (i.e. physical changes to the body) when put into stressful situations such as: running late for work, driving in peak hour traffic, dealing with staff, getting work completed on time, arguing with their spouses, paying bills, etc. These things might not be real physical threats, but they can nevertheless bring about physical changes in the body. These changes tend to stay with us for a long period of time and are not easily removed through natural body reactions.

Modern humans with their new technology, do less physical work, stimulate themselves when tired (television, food, alcohol), and eat when they are not hungry, etc. This actually goes against all natural feelings and signals from the brain. Humans are actually depriving themselves, and this is a major psychosocial cause of stress. Another psychosocial cause of stress is adaptation overload where people are being faced by constant or rapid change whether it is social, cultural, technological, etc.

There are also biological causes of stress such as poor nutrition, and the effects of pollutants, drugs (e.g. alcohol, prescription and non prescription drugs, tobacco, etc.) and loud noise on the body.
There are damaging effects to human bodies caused by such stress. These include reduced resistance to disease; pathological changes such as the development of ulcers, heart problems and emotional problems such as depression or aggressive behaviour.

There are three well-defined stages of stress -
1. The alarm reaction stage when the body mobilises for action, and sends signals indicating stress is occurring.
2. The resistance stage (adaptation). The body tries to adapt to overcome the stress. The stress
response generally appears in a particular part of the body, for example in the brain or stomach.
3. Exhaustion stage through continuous alarm reaction and resistance the body system or organ begins to breakdown, for example the development of an ulcer, or the onset of a heart attack.

Health and Fitness are simply some of many the different words used to describe people being in good condition. There are many different services and products on offer which promise to improve or maintain a state of wellbeing, and any (or all) of these goods and services might be considered to be part of the health and fitness industry. These can include things as variable as medical services through to sport, recreation and food.

The Health and Fitness industry is not a clearly defined industry. It does have many aspects to it, and it does overlap into many different fields. Your perception of the scope of this field may be limited as you commence this course; but on completing the course it should have broadened considerably; and in doing so your prospects for employment should have also broadened.

This comprehensive introductory course develops an understanding of the nature and scope of human health and wellbeing, and of the health and fitness industry looking at subjects such as nutrition, lifestyle, preventative health, and alternative medicine.