What is the Center for Healthful Living?

The Center for Healthful Living (CHL) promotes healthful living though educational programs that encourage frequent physical activity and informed lifestyle choices. The CHL provides a wide range of opportunities for physical engagement including organized team sports, intramural offerings, access to state-of-the-art fitness facilities, and a diverse assortment of other recreational activities. Additionally, credit-bearing courses and extracurricular health education promote an understanding of the importance and interplay of the multiple dimensions of fitness and wellness.

The Center for Healthful Living’s emphasis on the balance between the physical, emotional, social, mental, spiritual, environmental, and occupational aspects of our being provides the campus community with pathways toward optimal living. The Center’s staff comprises teachers, coaches, health educators, and fitness instructors who collaborate with college nutritionists, Student Health and Counseling professionals, Academic Services, the academic divisions, and other units to create a campus-wide approach to wellness.

The CHL motto is “educate the mind and exercise the body!”

CHL Values include:

Seven Dimensions of Wellness – The CHL focuses programs and services based on the seven dimensions of wellness that include physical, emotional, social, mental, spiritual, environmental, and occupational well-being. These dimensions were developed by Dr. Bill Hettler of the National Wellness Institute.

Lifelong Skills Acquisition – Programs and services offered through CHL will emphasize health promoting skills that can be learned during the college years and applied throughout a person’s lifetime.

Excellence in Teaching – The CHL is dedicated to high quality instruction of all credit-bearing and non-credit-bearing courses and is dedicated to assessment as a means to improve educational initiatives.

Commitment to Liberal Arts education – The CHL offers programs and services dedicated to furthering the liberal arts philosophy of Oxford College.

Students are required to earn two semester hours in Physical Education from the Center for Healthful Living. Students must complete one physical education course during their first year and sophomores must complete one physical education class during their sophomore year, unless granted an exemption by the Dean of Academic Affairs, in consultation with the Academic Coordinator of The Center for Healthful Living.

Courses in the CHL include swimming, cycling, basketball, yoga, volleyball, fitness walking, circuit training, scuba, badminton, outdoor cycling, tai chi, ballet, modern dance, golf and tennis.

The Center for Healthful Living focuses on curricular and co-curricular services that address the seven dimensions of wellness. These dimensions were developed by the National Wellness Institute (NWI). By applying the model, students will become aware of the interconnectedness of the dimensions and how each dimension contributes to leadings a healthy lifestyle. The NWI offers six dimensions and the CHL uses seven, to account for the differences between emotional and mental wellbeing. The seven dimensions that guide the CHL services are physical, emotional, social, mental, spiritual, environmental, and occupational well-being.

Health Education

Health promotion moves beyond the individual-level scope of health education and focuses on broader, community-level interventions. Health promotion often includes changing environmental conditions to support healthy living through advocacy, coalition building and policy change. Our health educator conducts assessments on campus wellness and analyzes data to determine priorities.

The health educator at Oxford College offers various educational workshops and seminars throughout the year designed to promote student wellness.  Outreach programming addresses a variety of issues pertinent to students' academic, interpersonal, emotional, and physical well-being.  Programs are student-oriented, evidence-based, and dynamic.

Students, at times, engage in lifestyle choices that potentially interfere with their goals for achieving academic success, fulfilling friendships and romantic relationships, and, overall, healthy minds, bodies, and spirits.  To help students engage in optimum self-care, the health educator works collaboratively to offer student programs that address the following important issues:  alcohol/drug/tobacco misuse and harm reduction, sexual assault prevention, effective stress management, cultivating and sustaining healthy relationships, coping with test anxiety, improving time management,  sexual health promotion,  and sustaining adequate sleep and nutrition.  Other programs are offered as well, depending on student need and request. 

Health Education at Oxford follows the American College Health Association’s “Standards of Practice for Health Promotion in Higher Education” as a guide for improving the quality of our campus environment to facilitate student engagement and wellbeing.

Newsletter

To learn more about the events occuring within The Center for Healthful Living or to stay up-to-date with the latest happenings within Oxford College Athletics, please feel free to click the button below and join our monthly newsletter list.