AU now an Exercise is Medicine® campus
ASHLAND, Ohio – Ashland University has launched Exercise is Medicine® On Campus, an initiative driven by its exercise science program to promote a culture of physical activity and chronic disease prevention and management, during the 2025-26 academic year. AU is now one of more than 200 institutions worldwide to have officially registered with EIM-OC.
“The whole purpose of Exercise is Medicine as a global umbrella is to help encourage and educate both the population and healthcare providers about the benefits of exercise and physical activity,” explained Levi Jones ’22, clinical assistant professor of exercise science. “Exercise and movement (are) one of the first line treatments that both prevents and treats nearly every single chronic disease and condition, and for the most part, it’s free. The results are just astounding of how beneficial it can be. That being said, it doesn’t get utilized to the extent that it should.”
EIM-OC at Ashland is encouraging faculty, staff and students to work together toward improving the health and well-being of the campus community through various measures, such as making movement a part of the daily culture, assessing physical activity at student health visits and providing the tools necessary to strengthen healthy physical activity habits that can last a lifetime.
When Jones returned to his alma mater, he wanted to incorporate EIM after introducing some of its concepts and seeing the positive benefits as a clinical exercise physiologist at a hospital in St. Louis. He emphasized that treatment with an exercise component “is just as important as any vital sign that gets assessed,” and the results demonstrated “patients were able to leave the hospital sooner, re-admission rates were going down.”
Jones introduced EIM to the student-run exercise science club as well as to various partners on campus, and the team of students proceeded to put together a number of programs and events for the AU community during the fall semester. Examples include partnering with the AU Wellness Team to give fitness assessments, creating campus educational flyers and a social media account, and maybe most impressive, developing a EIM Lecture Series on strength training, faith and fitness and mental health. There will be additional programming this spring.
EIM was co-launched by the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) and the American Medical Association (AMA) in 2007 as a United States-based health initiative, but quickly turned into a global health initiative, now coordinated by ACSM. Its vision is to make physical activity assessment and promotion a standard in clinical care, connecting health care with evidence-based physical activity resources for people everywhere of all abilities.