Workout lab underway at Cahaba Elementary

It’s Friday afternoon at Cahaba Elementary gym, and physical education teacher Jaime Giangrosso has spent a lot of her time this week raising and lowering seats — seats that are part of a new workout lab in her gym for students and faculty funded by one of Trussville City Schools Foundation’s new grants. 

TCSF recently awarded 11 grants to teachers throughout the school system — a total of $7,500 — to help fund certain projects that are considered innovative teaching ideas. Teachers, including Giangrosso, submitted proposals for their projects with a cap of $1,000. 

A physical education teacher at Cahaba since it opened in 2016, Giangrosso wrote the grant and said she is excited about the project. 

“I found a deal at Walmart — a stationary bike and an elliptical for $188, so it was $940 for everything,” she said. “I’m working to write grants for everything. I just wrote a Jump Rope for Heart grant for $2,500.” 

The workout lab houses five stationary bikes and five elliptical machines, and it is hoped to be fully functioning by next winter break, complete with TVs along the walls and medicine balls and kettlebells filling one area. 

“We want students to learn the difference in weights by the time they leave here,” Giangrosso said. “I also want to add a climbing wall, but that’s for later.”

Part of the vision for the lab is for it to be an active learning environment, not just a room for getting fit. That’s why the word “lab” was chosen for it, Giangrosso said, adding that she hopes for teachers of all curricula to plan lessons for the room and especially STEM lessons, which is a grouping of science, technology, engineering and math lessons that are hands-on and inquiry-based. 

One class per day will be taken into the lab, and there will be a sign-up sheet for teachers to use, she said. For motivation, there will be theme days, such as Workout Wednesday or Fitness Friday, and there are plans to have exercise classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays for faculty, as well as options to work out after school, Giangrosso said. 

“For now, I tell the kids to ‘push-push’ as hard as you can when we’re in here,” she said. “We haven’t messed with the resistance levels on the machines yet. They will learn to adjust the resistance and build from there.” 

Changing the seat heights on the bikes for the wide range of kindergartners is routine now, she said. 

While teaching at Paine Primary, the gym also had a fitness arcade for 13 years, with one wall of TVs and one wall of equipment. 

“A lot of our equipment we had at Paine is broken, so I’m working on that,” Giangrosso said. 

Now, Magnolia Elementary has started working on adding a workout room for students, too. 

The assessment used to measure students’ fitness is the Alabama Physical Fitness Assessment, which targets achieving and maintaining a healthy level of fitness in the areas of aerobic cardiovascular endurance, muscular strength and endurance, abdominal strength and endurance and flexibility. 

Students take the test in the fall, and they write their own fitness goals for the upcoming spring. After spring testing, they check their goals to see if they have accomplished them. 

Giangrosso said her goals are to teach the students how to stay fit for a lifetime.  

“I want them to not be scared of the equipment,” she said. “It’s important to teach fitness at a young age. My goal is for them to learn how to take care of themselves.”