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UP and Moving just getting started after more than 100 workouts

When it became clear COVID-19 was a serious threat, there were many emotions for people around the world. For students led by Steve Elmer, PhD, including Doctoral Student Isaac Wedig, it meant trying to do their part by starting UP and Moving. “We’re the exercise people,” Wedig said of those early moments. “We knew physical activity is really important for health, so we thought we need to promote this and then slowly as we started this project to get people active, more and more evidence has come out to back this up." That became increasingly clear when a study by Dr. Robert Sallis was published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine on the topic. The evidence pointed to a clear conclusion: Consistently meeting physical activity guidelines was strongly associated with a reduced risk for severe COVID-19 outcomes among infected adults. That study was a huge reason why Dr. Sallis was invited to be the speaker for the June 2021 edition of the UP Health Science and Medicine Lecture Series. In this podcast we talk about that study, but we focus more on the movement Dr. Elmer and Wedig started with UP and Moving. UP and Moving provides free live and recorded home-based workouts with the goal is to keep adults in the Upper Peninsula physically active and healthy during the pandemic and beyond. They do live workouts six days a week - folks can participate in the workouts on the website, they’re streamed on Facebook live and all of the workouts are archived on YouTube. They air workouts on ABC10 the first and third Sunday of every month. They are also doing DVD’s, call (906) 487-2715 to order DVDs.