U of L student raising awareness about physical activity for cancer patients and survivors with new campaign

“As a topic close to my heart, I am looking to make a change in the community, one that I did not get to make for Brock,” Riglin said.

She decided to create an awareness campaign called #MoveThatMan to support men’s health, targeting the support people to get their men up and moving, as physical activity has shown copious benefits for cancer patients and survivors.

Mike Dew, an Exercise Physiologist at the Culos-Reed Health & Wellness Lab and one of Riglin’s preceptors helping her with the campaign, says what they do is look at how to best apply exercise programs in a community setting for cancer survivors.

“The research is at a point where it’s irrefutable that if cancer survivors are more physically active, they will have better outcomes. Better physical outcomes, emotional outcomes, mental health outcomes, and they just generally get a better quality of life. There’s also evidence that’s increasing pretty much every year that exercise can even help to prevent reoccurrence and even help with any sort of progression of the cancer as well.”

They’re more on the applied side of it, so their whole point is to try and get sustainable programs going either in the community or online and try to make them accessible for cancer patients.

“Because right now unlike cardiac disease where people are pretty much mandated to go and do an exercise program, that’s not the case with cancer right now, even though it is in a couple of other countries,” Dew explained. “We’re always trying to push that forward in Canada, and that’s where #MoveThatMan came from.”

It’s an attempt to try and get people to be active, and support cancer survivors to be active too, but it’s specific to the male population.

The campaign is social media driven, and Riglin is encouraging the support people to get videos or pictures of their men moving and post them using the hashtag, in hopes that more will catch on to the idea and share their stories.

One of the big keys for those involved is knowledge translation, something Dr. Nicole Culos-Reed is focused on in particular, to bring the findings that they’ve seen in research settings and actually provide a sustainable means to put those into practice.

There’s a study going on right now in Alberta that’s a community-based program, called Alberta Cancer and Exercise or ACE, and Dew says the whole point is to try to show that exercise programming is cost effective and feasible so that it can be a part of standard care.

“From what we understand from practitioners is the last item we need to prove is that it’s going to save the health care system money. There’s not a lot of attention in the general public put towards cancer and cancer survivorship. I’m not the person to say why that is because it’s not my area of expertise, but it’s just something we accept and we’re constantly trying to fight to get the awareness towards it.“It’s not the most ground-breaking thing, we know that exercise pretty much helps everything, it’s just trying to put it together into the most digestible way, so people feel like it’s worth their time.”

That’s where Riglin came up with #MoveThatMan because, in most of the programs that they run, men are underrepresented even though the diagnoses aren’t at lower levels than women being diagnosed with cancer.

“In a lot of our community and online programs, men make up a very small portion of the people who actually choose to take part, so we’re trying to take action to get men going as much as women,” Dew added.

Dew’s primary role at the U of C’s Health and Wellness lab is as an exercise physiologist with a prostate cancer-specific program called TrueNTH.

The TrueNTH (pronounced True North) Lifestyle Management Program is part of the Global TrueNTH network funded by Movember (in partnership with Prostate Cancer Canada nationally) that aims to improve the survivorship experience for men living with prostate cancer.

“We initially did community programs, and now we do basically just online programs and promote community programs from other organizations, like the ACE program. Basically, from what we’ve seen as there’s no real research to this although we’re getting ready to publish a focus group that we did, is that women just feel more invested to take part in their health following a diagnosis.

“Whereas men tend to not be as eager to make a full-scale lifestyle change even though they’ve had this wake-up call with the diagnoses, they need a little bit of a period to really take into account what’s happened before they want to do something like this,” Dew stated.

A lot of time men just don’t know about this information, and women just want to put a little bit more of an onus on their health than men do.

Riglin says with that gender divide, part of the initiative here was to focus on the support person.

“From personal experience, in many cases, the support person is usually the more positive outlook on things and is probably the one who is going to push the cancer patient or survivor to go do something,” Riglin continued. “Just in general in life, you have those support people in your life to push you to do better.”

While most cancer patients or survivors don’t have the energy or time to dedicate to the gym, #MoveThatMan promotes physical health in other ways, things like dancing, walking, at home workouts, yard work, farming, or whatever it may be.

Dew says they hear a lot from the men that participate in their programs that their significant others or their friends have had a big role in getting them in the door.

“It’s not this way across the country, but for ACE and TrueNTH, the programs are free. So, they’re usually 12-week programs in the community, and there’s one starting in Lethbridge in January. Then the online programming with TrueNTH, which is prostate cancer-specific, is also free and you get access to an exercise physiologist. These are all services that would be decently costly if they weren’t funded or weren’t done in a cost-effective manner,” Dew said.

But, regardless of that, men appear to be apprehensive and they need the knowledge that these programs are not as intimidating as they think by having them affirmed by a spouse or a friend.

“Most of the community programs are in a group setting so that we can make sure that there is that social support side of things, and it does turn into a little bit of a locker room or support group kind of feel. People talk about their different experiences and they’re able to bond over it, and before you know it, they’re making friends for life and that has a real positive outlook on their quality of life going forward.”

As most of those working at the Health and Wellness lab have backgrounds in kinesiology or exercise science, Riglin was brought in because she’s from a public health background.

“With the focus on how do we best get the knowledge that these programs exist out to the men who qualify for them and once it’s out there how do we actually convince them to come through the doors?

“It was Sydney that said instead of trying to bang down the doors of the health care professionals, let’s reach out to the support people in some sort of way.”

Riglin looked at it from the prostate cancer side of things specifically to start with, and Dew with a laugh said they always joke about how they’re going to use social media with a whole bunch of 65-year-old men who hold the Facetime camera way below their chin.

“Using the support people seemed like a natural thing because there’s research out there that shows how much of an impact they make, and that’s where she came up with #MoveThatMan.”

Especially with it being past the midway point of Movember, Riglin hopes the campaign can bring about some community awareness, and become a fun and catchy initiative that people are excited to engage in.

“I figured it would be a different way to openly talk about cancer and men’s health. Brock’s scholarship, The Brock Hirsche Pronghorn Hockey Award, acknowledges his memory as a leader on and off the ice, and I hope that #MoveThatMan can help keep his memory alive, but also help other men facing the battle with cancer, as well as their support persons,” Riglin said.

by Aaron Mahoney (@Mahones93 on Twitter)

U of L student raising awareness about physical activity for cancer patients and survivors with new campaign

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