Let’s get physically active
(c) Sabrina Nemis
On Fridays, Jasmine van Schouwen ends her week as a law student at 4 p.m. and fights through traffic to get to Nepean for a 5:45 p.m. dance rehearsal. She’ll have another rehearsal the next day for three hours in the afternoon between doing homework. Since the beginning of September, she’s been rehearsing for a show in early December.
“It almost makes exams more bearable,” she said one Friday evening before rehearsal. “Knowing that I’m going to be studying all day, but then tonight I get to go to my rehearsals. It’s nice to have a space where you can sort of tune out and focus on something else.”
It’s an experience more familiar to school kids than it is to young adults — 84 per cent of Canadians 17-years-old and younger play sports, according to a 2014 report on the Canadian youth sports market by Solutions Research Group.
But most post-secondary students and adults don’t, and it is affecting not just their physical, but likely also their mental well-being.
According to Statistics Canada the numbers start to drop in high school. By their early twenties, while many are working or in post-secondary programs only 37 per cent are active in sports.
At 20 years old, van Schouwen is an exception.
Her start in sports came young — she began dancing at the age of two and loved it. For a time she even hoped to become a professional dancer. She would attend summer audition programs in Winnipeg and Toronto, hoping to move to one of those cities and join their dance companies. Unfortunately, she was never chosen.
“Dance is very specific about what they look for in body and stuff,” she said. “So it turned out I couldn’t really do it as my career.”
Van Schouwen decided she would apply to the joint political science and law program at the University of Ottawa. She knew that many dancers quit after high school, but she said, “I couldn’t imagine hearing the music and not dancing and being a part of it.”
By staying in her hometown she could stay involved with her company, Les Petits Ballets.
Anne Bowker, associate professor in psychology at Carleton University, said that moving away post high school contributes to students being less involved in sports. She said that when people move to a new place, they lose the connections that kept them involved.
Those connections are important for more than just staying active.
“We know that for university students, one of the important predictors of adjustment to university in first year is making connections,” said Bowker.
Part of why van Schouwen wanted to stay in Ottawa was the ease of continuing with her company, but it was also to stay with the group of girls she’d been dancing with for years.
Joanna Hughes, the choreographer for Les Petits Ballets said: “They have a nice group of friends that they’ve been dancing with for a long time and I think there’s a lot of camaraderie there.”
The four dancers have all graduated from high school in the past few years and continued dancing with the company while pursuing university educations.
“We’re helping each other out,” van Schouwen said. “It’s kind of like the four of us are a support group.”
© Sabrina Nemis
For others, like Jazzmin Bond, dancing after high school became impossible for a number of reasons. She said it was too expensive to pay for without her parents’ help and she was concerned about scheduling, but the biggest factor was that she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at 18 years old.
“I have trouble managing core temperature,” she said. “So it was a big adjustment for my body. I wasn’t able to do any high-intensity activity anymore.”
Bond has tried to keep active in other ways though, practising yoga and some ballet—though not at such a high level.
But Bond believes most people quit because once they start post-secondary education, “It’s difficult to make the time.”
Van Schouwen said a lot of people react to her being in law school and dancing with surprise that she has the time, but she doesn’t think it’s a big deal.
“It sounds like a lot, but I don’t know anyone who doesn’t do something else outside of school,” she said. “There are people who go to the gym, or people who paint, or who write music.”
She manages her time by being extremely organized. “Every minute of my life is planned,” she said. She wants to make sure that she has time for the things she enjoys doing — not just dancing — because it’s so easy to forget to do things she hasn’t included in her schedule.
Bowker said scheduling and making physical activity into a habit is important in keeping up a healthy lifestyle after childhood and adolescence.
“Those health habits are really important to get instilled early on,” she said. “Because how active you are in university is sort of predictive of how active you might be later on as an older adult.”
The health benefits become even more pronounced as one gets older. Physical activity can help reduce the likelihood of developing cardiovascular diseases and chronic illnesses. It also has a positive impact on mental health.
Bowker said research has shown a correlation between regular exercise and decreased chance of experiencing depression.
She said there’s no prescribed level of activity but “what seems to be important is that you get your heart rate up. It doesn’t necessarily have to be for hours and hours at a time. Brisk walking is going to be better than strolling in that sense.”
According to Statistics Canada, not being interested in physical activity is one of the reasons why adults are less active.
For van Schouwen, being able to stay active with friends in a sport she enjoys has been essential to her continuing dance.
She still has two years of her law degree to finish and she intends to keep dancing. As for her post-graduate life, it’s still far enough in her future that she’s unsure how she will stay fit.
“I’d like to say I’m going to keep doing this forever,” she said. “I don’t know where I’m going to be, but I hope that I’m going to keep doing this. In fact, I don’t think I could not do it.”
