Over the past five years, over 120,000 secondary school students have taken part in the Irish Life Heath School's Fitness Challenge.
This year the winners of Fittest School, Most Improved School, Fittest Boy and Fittest Girl were awarded prizes at Croke Park where Olympian Thomas Barr, Operation Transformation's Niall Moyna, Cork camogie star Ashling Thompson, and renowned Sports Psychologist Kate Kirby were in attendance.
Listen back to our RTÉ Radio 1 Extra interview with Ashling Thompson below.
The challenge is a great initiative and the results give a great insight into the health and fitness levels of Ireland's children. Unfortunately, not all the results bring good news. It is becoming more and more apparent that girls are falling behind when it comes to fitness.
We caught up with Olympian and fitness guru Thomas Barr to find out how teenagers and parents alike can get involved in running! These tips are ideal for beginners and are great for getting the whole family involved in fitness!
- Have a goal! Whether it is a 5k race/10k race or to complete your first 5k at a Park Run, you’ll make things a lot easier for yourself if you have a finish line in sight.
- Make sure you have the appropriate gear and footwear. There are a number of shops around that specialise in running so any one of these will help you to find appropriate shoes and clothes for you.
- Try training with other people or with a club. This can be a great way to improve your enjoyment of running, as well as testing yourself against other people. Many clubs and running groups now cater for all runners regardless of ability from a complete beginner to the more experienced runner.
- Mix your running surfaces. Too much running on one surface can lead to injury so where possible vary between road/grass/trail/path/treadmill. This also gives some variety to your training.
- If you always run at the same speed you’re just training yourself to run at that speed so mix up your paces. You can try simple intervals like 1-minute hard/1-minute easy to start with and make them more difficult as you get the hang of them.
- Try to include weights, circuits or pilates in your training week as it can be great for injury prevention and helps to make you a stronger runner. It might be as simple as 15 minutes of pilates/core type exercises straight after a run or a more structured program if you have the time.
- If you have pain running and you’re unsure about why - STOP! Go see your Physiotherapist, find out why you have a problem and then deal with it.
- Try to make running a part of your work day. Many people use 'lack of time' as an excuse not to run, but it may be possible for you to run into or out of work, or to run at lunchtime. This allows you most efficient use of your time.
- Finally, enjoy your running! Every session you do doesn’t have to be better than the last one. Schedule easy runs for yourself where you don’t worry about pace and just enjoy a being out and getting exercise.
What do you think of Thomas Barr's tips? Let us know on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook!
RTÉ LifeStyle's Taragh Loughrey-Grant interviews Cork camogie captain Ashling Thompson about her health and fitness advice on RTÉ Radio 1 Extra - listen back here.
We need your consent to load this rte-player contentWe use rte-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences
