1249 Club

1249 Club, the Dawson Health Challenge

An initiative to encourage students and staff to engage in physical activity and adopt a healthy lifestyle.
A collaboration between: Campus Life & Leadership, Living Campus, and Health Services

What is the 1249 club?

The 1249 club is Dawson College’s version of the Défi Santé Montmorency, created in 2004 by Ginette Laferrière, a physical education teacher at cégep Montmorency, in Laval.
It is an original, dynamic and innovative program designed to encouraged students and staff to do more physical activity and adopt a healthier lifestyle.

Since 2007, more than 55 health challenges were implemented. More than 20 000 people participated, for a total of 5600 teams in 400 different institutions. More than 5 million of health-kilometers were gathered, which represents 13 times the moon-earth distance!

What are the goals of the 1249 club?

The main objective of the 1249 club is to encourage participants to do more physical activity and promote active living.

Other objectives are targeted through the implementation of the 1249 club, such as:

• Encourage better stress management
• Encourage better sleeping habits
• Encourage healthy eating
• Favour mental health
• Avoid smoking and consuming energy drinks
• Prevent alcohol abuse
• Favor positive changes in the College environment (school climate, physical environment, etc.)

The 1249 club does not make the promotion of one type of physical activity such as team sports, registering to a gym, running, etc. 1249 club encourages participants to find physical activities that they enjoy practicing, or doing daily activities differently to incorporate more physical activity in them (for example: walking instead of taking the car or doing household tasks instead of asking someone else to do them).

Each activity is then converted to a number of health-kilometers (according to the amount of energy you spent).