OH! Magazine - Australian Version November 2015

( Exercise Adherence ) http://50sports.org PAUL BROWN 50 SPORTS IN 50 WEEKS: THEY DID IT! After years of research and forward planning, Paul Brown and his family have concluded their 50 Sports in 50 Weeks campaign, where they inspired people from all over the world, to get off the couch – one sport at a time! here is an alarming global trend of declining participation in sport and exercise among today’s youth. To help counter this, my family and I set out to complete one of the most ambitious and challenging projects ever undertaken: completing 50 Sports in 50 Weeks, as a way to encourage kids and their grown ups to adopt more active lifestyles. T Our message was simple: we’ve found 50 sports to do as a family, so surely every other family can find at least one! You get one body, so you have to get it right! For 50 weeks, a camera crew travelled with us – to 76 cities in 26 countries on 6 continents. Each week we tried and often competed in a wide variety of sports ranging from Cup Stacking to Ski Jumping, Floorball to Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and Tug-O-War to Ten Pin Bowling. We also experienced many sports modified for people with physical or intellectual impairments, including Wheelchair Rugby, Wheelchair Table Tennis and Adaptive Alpine Skiing. Along the way, we were able to secure many of the world’s top athletes and coaches as our mentors. We tackled each sport at its most iconic location, often retracing the sports’ origin, such as Golf at St Andrews, Ice Climbing in Alberta Canada, and we even set a world first by playing Table Tennis on top of the Great Wall of China! The most important part of our 50 Weeks’ mission were the school talks. In almost every country we visited schools and community centres and delivered our ‘Get it Right’ talks. We directly impacted over 10,000 kids and I feel very proud to know we made a real difference to their knowledge and attitudes towards their health. I am confident many of them will make better decisions growing up, thanks to that talk they heard from a travelling family from Australia! The final task now is to take the thousands of hours of footage that we recorded, and create a documentary that can further carry our feelgood message, and hopefully get more kids and their grown ups off the couch! Take a look at the clip below to enjoy a summary of some of the activities that we experienced, during our 50 Sports in 50 Weeks adventures. https://vimeo.com/143253795 ( OH! MAGAZINE ) NOVEMBER 2015 11

OH! Magazine - Australian Version November 2015 | Page 11