There are two awards that we find of great importance.
One is the Presidential Volunteer Service Award.
ETE, through our association with Ray Hayden's video production company, is able to submit candidates for the Presidential Volunteer
Service Award as that company is an Approved Certifying Organization for the award. We seek out candidates who have completed the
equivalent of two years of full time volunteer service (2000 hours) and have achieved the President's Call to Service Award for lifetime achievement
in volunteer service. All of the people we have located have far exceeded the 2000 hour requirement.
The second one is even more important, The President's Challenge.
The President's Challenge is a physical fitness program which simply tracks your progress of participating in some level of fitness on a
consistent basis.
The President's Challenge:
The plan has evolved. There are now basically two primary programs in which to participate, the President's Active Lifestyle Award, and the Presidential
Champion's Award.
We use both. The theory behind the physical fitness activities in the United States rest on the idea of a healthy mind in a healthy body.
Since our brains pretty much run our body, our body is responsible for doing it's part to allow the brain to function at it's best. This is an important concept,
you have to be able to participate to the best of your ability. Initially, if you had been without exercise for some time, it will likely not be easy to get back in
the groove...
This is why we use both programs...
The President's Active Lifestyle Award:
As easy as it can be, you have eight weeks to complete this program once you start. Within those eight weeks, six of them must meet the following
requirement (for adults):
30 minutes of exercise for five of seven days.
You have seven days in a week. Five of those seven days require that you participate in some sort of "exercise." And this is where they make it easier for us, the
PALA program has a long list of activities, even walking each day can add up to meeting the requirement. Check the website and see what counts, many activities
will do it.
We have a simplistic plan - see lower on this page - for what we do, and how we start, the areas that count as activities for PALA won't really get you into where
we are trying to go in the long run, which is sustained healthy living.
The really important thing, from our perspective, is to get you using the system and logging your activity each day.
If you exercise for five of seven days each week, in six weeks, you are done with the PALA program and move on to the Presidential Champion's program.
Presidential Champion's Program:
This is where the program really evolved. There used to be two levels of this program. One was point limited per day, the other was not. They eliminated the lower
point program and we only have the higher level available to us.
The website can take you through all of the fine details of the program, but all of the points you earn in the PALA program travel along with you. The site keeps track
of your total point earnings, which is important much later on down the road.
In this program, you work up to the Bronze Award, then continue to the Silver and Gold levels. After the Gold level, there is indeed a Platinum Award, and it takes
one million points to earn it! The Gold Award is "only" 160,000 points. It takes a little while to score the Platinum Award!
The goal is to do exercise as often as you feel up to it, and as much of it as you can. Our goal is to do as much as we can, when we can - and most importantly, to
log it in to our page.
Ray found some music on You Tube that has a good beat to it. One of the great things about You Tube is that you can save music to your favorites list. This makes
it so that you can find a set of music to work out to, and not have to "re-find" it each time.
Currently, Ray's list includes six songs. He chose them for the timing of the beat. The list runs about 26 minutes long. Four of the songs are less than 3.5 minutes long.
One of them is 4.25 minutes long, and the long one is 8.5 minutes long. All of them are close to 120 beats per minute... you would work up a solid sweat.
One minute of Ray's workout is worth just over 9.5 points (9.66666666). It takes a while to hit that million points!
Again, we begin with the PALA program, 30 minutes of this sort of workout each day for five days. Six weeks later, we jump into the Presidential Champion's program
and get working toward higher point level days.
Keep in mind that Ray is working on the 9.5 point per minute level, we do not recommend starting out there! Work up to it. Aerobics has three levels, easy, moderate,
and pretty intense. Ray started out with Level 1 and 30 minutes and built up to his current routine.
The idea of all of this is to keep ourselves as healthy as we can until the day the final curtain falls. By the very nature of being born, each of us has been gifted with
the fact that we will indeed die. We can choose to be as healthy as our DNA allows us to be, or we can slowly fade away.
If you are here, reading this, you fall into the realm of those who choose to be as healthy as possible all the way out to the end of the line. We wish you the very best
of joy and happiness, but - most of all, the very best of health that you can achieve!
Ray's Simplistic Plan:
by Ray Hayden:
I like to jog, or run, or ride a bike. I do not like getting hit by cars, chased by dogs or caught in the rain. If I "need" to be at home for any reason, I prefer to be
right there (I also work out of an office right next to my house) as it makes life easier for me in general.
I had belonged to gyms over the years, but you have to go to them. I really like some of the equipment and used free weights. What I decided to do, for these
programs, was to develop a simplistic aerobic workout that will earn points quickly, allow me to NOT hurt myself, and allow me to be at my home office as much
as I could be.
You Tube:
I searched around for different programs, and what I found was "running in place" is a good way to exercise without having to go out in the weather.
Running in place can also cause injury, especially to those who have not run for years, or those just getting into exercise again, so I worked on trying to find
an easy way to slide into the process for almost anyone.
The disclaimer is to make sure you are healthy enough for exercise before beginning any program.
That said, walking in place is something that most of us can do, so, rather than running in place, I decided to start off with simply walking in place. Later on,
I hope to produce a video and put it online of what I am talking about, but I think you can figure it out.
The basic idea is to move... just move to the music. 120 Beats per minute is the speed that we used to march at in the military.
The basic step is just walking, but with keeping your toes on the ground, don't lift them off the ground. This is to ease into it slowly, warm up, and build up
to more advanced movements.
The more advanced movements are just what you can handle. If you feel any pain or discomfort, stop doing whatever made it hurt, and use slower, smaller
moves. If it stops hurting, you're on the right track, keep working. If it hurts, stop and do a self evaluation, and seek medical assistance if it comes to that.
The idea is not not hurt yourself and build up to bigger movements. My goal is to have your legs get strong. My idea is that our legs carry all of our weight, so
it is rather important to have strong legs. Once we have that working, we can continue to increase efforts to build up a good solid sweat.
The most advanced moves that I make include lifting the feet off the ground, but not that high, sort of jogging in place, with shifting weight to put more
muscles into the mix of getting worked on.
The initial stage is to get moving and carefully build muscle (not in losing weight, but to gain more movement and ability). Once we have that in order, then
we can work on increasing time and effort to reduce our weight... I will continue to evolve this page, and consider putting a video online. Stay tuned.
