Plasma Robotics encourages fitness and health within our team and team members. With the mantra "Healthy Bodies, Healthy Minds", we strive to improve not only our physical health, but also the mental health that allows us to be more successful in our activities as a team and our lives in general.
Monthly Fitness Activities
As high school students (and adults), fitness is not always the easiest thing to work into our schedules, especially with our participation in FIRST Robotics. To solve this issue, we plan monthly fitness activities to get us up and moving as a team. As we exercise together, not only to we improve our physical health, but we also grow closer together as team members, classmates and friends.
Monthly Fitness Activities Include:
- Ultimate Frisbee (our Favorite)
- Ice Skating
- Aerial Aerobics
- Yoga
- Zumba
- Soccer
- Basketball
- Volleyball
- Hiking
- Kayaking
- Goat Yoga
Build Season De-stressing
Build Season is definitely the most stressful part of the year as a participant in the FIRST Robotics Competition. For team members, this period of the year includes hours worth of work each day of the week except for Sunday, and team members rarely leave their thoughts of Robot Build in the shop when they go home. If not considered, the intensity of FIRST Robotics Competition can easily lead to high levels of stress that not only decreases our happiness and efficiency, but has the potential to affect schooling as well.
To solve this challenge, Plasma Robotics strives to give team members productive ways to let out their stress. Each Saturday, team members take a break from the normal activities of Robot Build to play sports or participate in some other form of physical activity, which is scientifically shown to improve mental help and efficiency. Since we first implemented this portion of FIRSTgetFit, we have seen and felt tremendous improvement in our happiness and efficiency during the peaks of Build Season. And it's a lot of fun too!
Community Support
In addition to our own physical health, we also strive to support the physical health of our local community. One major way that we do this is through the support of local races and events. In addition to having team members participate when possible, we also bring our Recycle Rush (2015) Robot loaded full of water bottles to pass out to participants. In doing this, we have attended the Mesa Turkey Trot for multiple years as well as the run4k and the Holiday Jingle Run. In 2016, we also organized our own fun run with over 100 attendees and the support of a local sponsor and hope to host another in the upcomming year.
Competition Fun
The importance of fitness and physical / mental health does not end with the start of competition. In hopes of inspiring others and promoting good habits throughout the rest of the season, we bring fitness to each of our competitions. Each day, during lunch, we host fitness activities such as Ultimate Frisbee and encourage everyone to participate. In addition to promoting physical and mental health during the strenuous competition, these activities also help form bonds and friendships between teams and individual members, ultimately making the competition more cooperative.
Get Involved!
FIRSTgetsFit is not just for Plasma Robotics. The physical and emotional benifits of positive physical activity extend to any and all who are interested in participating. Through the FIRST Robotics Competition Discord, we have already seen several other teams begin to participate in similar fitness activities, and we encourage you to look into the same for your team or organization. If you do, reach out to us and let us know! - We'd love to hear and see the success of FIRSTgetsFit in the wider FIRST community and the world as a whole!