Districts

Improve Academics, Health and Attendance

We designed the Operation Tone-Up® course to be fun. It gets results because it is easy to implement, rigorous, and engaging. Students have to exercise hard—26 minutes of continuous aerobic exercise by the end of the program. And rigorous exercise pays off, with blood pressure often dropping by 10 points or more, and resting heart rate declining by 5-10+%. Students also learn and apply to themselves key nutritional knowledge. They change their eating and drinking habits, and often their families’ habits as well.

Just as important to school districts, our program has been shown to help improve academics and attendance! This is the Aha! moment, when district and school administrators realize that increasing aerobic exercise and improving nutrition is good for the mind as well as the body. Since the OTU curriculum is aligned with national academic standards in reading, writing, math, health and PE, Operation Tone-Up reinforces rather than distracting from classroom time for the core curriculum. More exercise and better nutrition increase brain activity and cognition, and mean that students pay better attention, are more disciplined, and do better on tests.

With better health and engagement, attendance also goes up, bringing more state funds to schools, and more than paying back the cost of the program.

Our program is easy to implement in any district. It is designed to coordinate with P.E. departments, but OTU can also be implemented by the regular classroom teacher with only two hours of training. Training is often conducted for all teachers in a district or set of schools at one time.

Exercises have been selected, so that they can be performed in the classroom, with an OTU exercise music DVD and CD. Teachers can join in and exercise with students, if they wish, or just play the DVD or CD for their students.

Finally, Operation Tone-Up follows through on its intensive 10-week program with guidelines to continue the benefits and reinforce the good fitness and nutrition habits learned in the 10-week segment throughout the year and into future years of lifelong healthy living.

Operation Tone-Up® is offered by national not-for-profit organization, Accept the Challenge, whose mission is to reduce childhood obesity through true knowledge of nutrition and exercise. For over ten years we have provided very low cost educational activities and materials to elementary schools, parent organizations, and community groups through Operation Tone-Up®, in order to empower students and teachers with the knowledge needed to develop lifelong healthy habits.

To find out more about OTU’s evidence-based results, and how OTU is different from other programs, click here.