My name is Jennifer Hornback, Certified Athletic Trainer for Tahoe Forest Health System Sports Medicine. I want to talk to you a little bit about a program that we started 3 years ago called BFIT. It was initially established between some athletic trainers and physical therapists to go into the school districts around the Lake Tahoe area to provide education and resources to our young teens and adolescents on healthy movement patterns in hopes to reduce the rate of injury risk in our kids around the community, especially in lower body injuries.
So, what that looks like is we have three athletic trainers that go into the elementary schools around the Lake Tahoe area. We work in collaboration with teachers in the classroom. We go into the classroom once a month. When we’re in the classrooms, we provide video education to the students. The BFIT program is an eight-month-long program, so there is a new movement that’s established every month.
For example, this October will be month one for the 2025–2026 school year. We’ll go in, we’ll watch the video. The students will learn about squatting, what that looks like, what they should do, what they shouldn’t do. For example, I’ll have a student come up to the front of the classroom after we watch the video. They’ll perform a squat, and then I’ll ask the classroom what they did well, what they could do better, and then we all work together and do it in the classroom so all the students will learn about squatting.
The teachers have a calendar that’s provided to them. You can find those resources on the Tahoe Forest Health page under Community Commitment. So, if you’re a parent or a teacher currently not participating in this program, you have access to those resources, too.
We want to provide healthy brain breaks throughout the classrooms, so they should perform these once a day for 5 minutes. Each week, the exercises will progress and get a little bit more challenging. There’s an incentive at the end of the school year for the students to participate. They fill out their calendar every week, and then at the end of the month, they’ll turn in those calendars. Whatever classroom has the most participation in the BFIT program will get rewards and prizes at the end of the school year.
It’s just something our Sports Medicine and Therapy Services program wants to provide to our community to help everyone learn about healthy movement patterns and again reduce those risks of injuries.
My name is Jennifer Hornback, Athletic Trainer with Tahoe Forest Sports Medicine. Thank you for watching.
