Community wellness program exceeds expectations

Pumpin’ Iron: Tanna Terry, junior nursing major and wellness program assistant, working out in WU-Moves’ facility. The program is located in PC 252.

Jackson Hermann

WU-Moves Community Wellness Program program can be found in Petro Allied Health Center, room 252.

After an internal grant last spring, Washburn has started a wellness program dedicated to overall wellness, both physical and mental.

“It’s all-inclusive wellness, not just fitness, but also nutrition, stress management, psychology, things like that,” said Park Lockwood, associate professor of kinesiology.

Not only is the kinesiology department involved, but so are many other departments and organizations across campus, with more planning to join the program.

“We’re trying to expand it and talk to different people across campus,” Lockwood said. “We’ve started the program and we’ve hired student workers, interns and volunteers that take clients through an individualized wellness program. We find what they need, whether it be a health issue or they just want to change their fitness level or nutrition or whatever it is and we try to tailor it to their needs and create a program for them.”

Geared towards low-income Topeka residents, it provides services completely free of charge to those who wouldn’t have access to them otherwise. While the wellness program is already staffed by kinesiology and nursing students, there are plans to expand the program’s volunteers to physical therapy students, psychology students and even the law school.

“We’re eventually going to contact law because we have clients come in that have some legal issues and this is really geared for low-income people who don’t have access to this,” Lockwood said. “So we give them access to it. [We’ll] bring in law for things that they have questions about.”

While the program has been in its infancy, only having been operating for a couple of months, the program is already garnering attention far above initial expectations.

“They somehow hear about us, [often] through Chris Omni from Makin’ Moves,” said Courtney Monzon, senior exercise physiology major and intern for WU-Moves. “She does a lot of different things with the community, with low-income people and does it for free. She does a lot of cool things. So we’re talking about it, getting more people in here, but so far we have had a ton of people. We’re already past our maximum.”

Students in the program are put through a variety of physical tests to help personalize their programs and identify what they might need to work on.

“Their first session is sort of like an assessment. We bring them in and we do all kinds of paperwork and do different assessments like blood glucose testing, cholesterol, weight, BMI, body fat percentage,” Monzon said. “And then we do different physical assessments like VO2 max estimate, different things like how many pushups they can do. Then we can reassess them in a month and then 3 months to see if they’re improving.”

The program has access to cardio equipment, resistance equipment and free weights, in addition to much more.

For any students who want to volunteer for the program or want to join the program and take advantage of its services, they should visit PC 252 or walk into the kinesiology department in PC 201.

“It’s really just trying to incorporate different departments to try and make a really wholesome approach at wellness, because there’s not one specific part of wellness that’s more important,” Monzon said.