Youth Week Calgary is nothing new for Crowfoot’s YMCA. Kevin Aranas, the location’s youth coordinator, explains it is a yearly event at their location. Youth Week is something that the Crowfoot YMCA has known about for a long time, but this year, the programs they offered were bigger and better than ever before. Programs were offered to 12-17 year olds and took place from 5-7 p.m. on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and from 2-6 p.m. on Saturday.
The YMCA kicked off their Youth Week activities on April 21 with a hip hop class and an art by youth activity.
On Wednesday night, the YMCA hosted an improv demo before opening the floor to Ping-Pong.
Friday evening focused on fitness, with a Zumba workshop being offered before a demo on the YMCA’s weight floor with youth resistance training. From 7-10 p.m. on Friday the YMCA hosted a youth night, with drop-in basketball, dance and ping-pong. The YMCA also opened their general facilities for the youth; the weight floor and pool were free to attendees.
On Saturday, the YMCA was off to a hardcore start with parkour demos, followed by art by youth, and scatterball, a game similar to dodgeball but played in a circle every-man-for-himself style. Following these events, a youth yoga class was offered, along with drop in soccer. The YMCA closed down their Youth Week with hip hop and break dancing demos to get youth pumped up for next year’s Youth Week.
All in all the Crowfoot YMCA’s Youth Week was an activity-packed week, filled with events encouraging youth to get active, have fun, and meet other youth in their community.
Interested in fitness, and keen to try out the open workout floor the YMCA hosted on Friday, I decided to drop in for the Youth Resistance Training to
get some tips on lifting. Daisy, another Youth Coordinator at the Y, led the class, which consisted of me and a couple other girls. Daisy started off by correcting our workout stance, because yes, that can be wrong. This proved to be the most valuable part of the class for me, I learned a couple neat tricks from Daisy in regard to stance. For instance:
- Imagine a tail growing from your tailbone, now point it towards the floor. This lengthens your spine and straightens your back, correcting your posture.
- Your pelvic region is a bowl, it is full of cheerios, soup, something, and you don’t want to spill it. Keep the “bowl” of your hips forward facing, this will prevent slouching and is a helpful check for a variety of weights.
Daisy then went on to do a basic weight circuit with us, and worked personally with each girl to correct her posture, give her advice, or just cheer her on. I found out that I have generally good posture while lifting weights, and Daisy kept pushing me to add more weights to my lunges! Another neat trick I learned- when practicing squatting technique, position a chair behind you, and squat until your bum just brushes the chair. When you go to lift with some weight, you won’t lose your technique.
After our workout, we went and stretched, while we went over the importance of stretching in avoiding tight muscles, injuries, and a runner’s worst nightmare: shin splints. At the end of the class, the girls gave their feedback- the class was a success, most of them saying they would return to the Y, and do classes similar to the one we had just done if offered again. I would too, if I didn’t live in the South, and as I admired the YMCA’s track, I vowed I would visit a YMCA in the South sometime soon.
The Youth Resistance Training was a great success, it was a awesome way to introduce youth to lifting weight, something most teenage girls do not consider when focusing on their fitness, in a way that ensured that it would be done properly and safely should the girls choose to pursue it further.
While I had to go soon after the end of the class, I made sure to make time
to run a quick K on the track to try it out. I definitely am in love, and will be making a trip to the Y closest to me to try out their track in the near future.
After the event I got an interview with Kevin, and asked him about the event. Heavily involved in the running of the YMCA’s Youth Week, Kevin helped manage and promote programs, going to community businesses and schools to promote Youth Week, and attending all of the events to ensure they ran smoothly.
Overall the Youth Week was fairly successful, but like any event, some programs were more popular than others; the most popular being parkour, drop-in soccer, improv, and resistance training. Of all of them, parkour, which involves using one’s body and the objects around oneself to project from one object to the other, was the most popular. There were many onlookers to the event, and the astonished youth asked many questions about the “sport.” For a video of what parkour is, click here.
Kevin says that the YMCA is definitely planning on hosting more Youth Week events next year.
For next time, they hope to see more community involvement with the events, promote the events more, and hold group projects where youth can go out into the community, rather than just holding classes.
Where ever the YMCA goes with Youth Week, one thing that is clear is that it will continue to grow, and that next year’s Youth Week will be even bigger and better.