The Gasol Foundation and Básquet Girona bring healthy habits to the floor

Marc Gasol's club implements the ALLEYOOP project to promote healthy lifestyles among more than 100 players 

| Tuesday, 10 May 2022

● “Thanks to ALLEYOOP, the pillars of healthy eating, sleep and emotional well-being will be part of Girona Basketball’s training: this is another step towards making the club a comprehensive project beyond sport”, he commented Marc Gasol, president of Basketball Girona and co-founder of the Gasol Foundation.

● The results of the first edition of ALLEYOOP demonstrate that this type of program implemented in sports organizations is an effective way to promote healthy habits among children and their families.

● After its experience with the Gasol Foundation COACH+ and Basket4All initiatives, Girona Basketball continues to promote healthy lifestyles through sport.

Tuesday, May 10, 2022. Basketball goes beyond sport and Básquet Girona is a clear example. Thanks to the collaboration with the Gasol Foundation – the foundation of the brothers Pau and Marc Gasol whose mission is to prevent childhood obesity – the Catalan club’s grassroots teams will integrate the promotion of healthy lifestyle habits into their training , through the ALLEYOOP project.

“At Básquet Girona we want basketball to be a tool to improve the quality of life of the players, the coaching staff and also the families: in other words, of the entire educational community,” says Marc Gasol, co-founder of the Gasol Foundation and president of Basketball Girona. “The ALLEYOOP project allows us to do precisely this: enhance the four pillars of healthy lifestyle habits (physical activity and sports, healthy eating, sleep and emotional well-being) in a natural way during training and continue to build a healthier and more sustainable world”.

The Gasol Foundation started the ALLEYOOP project during the 2020-2021 academic year, in which 14 sports clubs from all over Spain, located in environments of socio-economic vulnerability, participated. The program consists of a series of training, training and activities aimed at introducing, improving and promoting healthy habits through specific basketball activities, which are adapted to its dynamics. In addition, the training for the coaches and the workshops, materials and content aimed at families manage to introduce the importance of healthy habits to the social environment of the players and make the intervention sustainable.

ALLEYOOP: AN EFFECTIVE PROJECT FOR THE PROMOTION OF HEALTHY HABITS 

The methodology of the ALLEYOOP project, which includes the four pillars of healthy lifestyle habits (physical activity and sport, healthy eating, sleep and emotional well-being), allows to strengthen and improve holistically lifestyles of the participating players, the technical team and the families.

“With ALLEYOOP we have shown that basketball courts are key spaces to promote healthy habits among families and thus prevent childhood obesity”, said Dr. Santi F. Gómez, Head of Research and Programs at the Gasol Foundation. “After participating in ALLEYOOP, boys and girls improve their knowledge, self-efficacy, skills and attitudes about healthy lifestyle habits,” he said. Specifically, of these four behavioral predictors (levers for changing habits), we observed a more pronounced improvement in knowledge about physical activity (1.35 on a scale of 1 to 10) and healthy eating (1.01).

Girona Basketball, founded in 2014 as CEB Marc Gasol, already implemented the Gasol Foundation COACH+ project in the 2017-2018 and 2018-2019 seasons, and participated in the Basket4All initiative, which was held in Fontajau. Since its foundation and under the presidency of Marc Gasol – also co-founder of the Gasol Foundation – it has maintained a clear commitment to society beyond the track, and this season it has started working on ODS 7 (Sustainable and non-polluting energy ), 13 (Climate Action) and 16 (Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions).

ABOUT THE GASOL FOUNDATION

According to data from the World Health Organization (WHO), childhood obesity is a phenomenon that affects 124 million boys and girls between the ages of 5 and 19 worldwide. Specifically in Spain, 1 out of every 3 minors between 8 and 16 years of age is overweight or obese according to the Gasol Foundation’s PASSOS study.

Faced with this reality, the foundation was born in 2013 by the brothers Pau and Marc Gasol – NBA players and All Stars – with the aim of preventing childhood obesity in both Spain and the United States. For this purpose, the entity, a member of the World Obesity Federation, focuses its activity on the launch of programs and initiatives to promote healthy habits – physical activity and sport, healthy eating, sleep and the emotional well-being of minors and their families—, and has become a reference center in the fight against this pandemic and in the commitment to scientific research in the area of ​​children’s health.

ABOUT BÀSQUET GIRONA

El Bàsquet Girona is a club founded in 2014 by Marc Gasol and a group of collaborators who adhere to their idea of ​​creating an entity that trains basketball and educates social values. In these eight years of the club’s life, Básquet Girona continues to grow year after year on the sports side, with a club in the LEB Or and more than twenty grassroots teams, and on the social side, getting involved in projects that promote healthy habits , sport and the English language among the students of the demarcation or in entities that look after the health of the environment.