eNewsletter: May 2016

Hospital Shenanigans: Know Your Rights

Read the full story previously posted on our blog:

Great Denver Nonprofit Organizations and Philanthropists

Serving Those Who Served

Over the last decade our country has made incredible strides in ensuring there are an abundance of resources dedicated to supporting veterans. Unfortunately, abundance does not always equate to effectiveness. As a result, service members, veterans, and associated family are left to shuttle from appointment to appointment, over the course of months or even years. Meanwhile, many are in crisis, whether facing homelessness, physical or mental health concerns, substance abuse issues, or other destabilizing factors.

Until now.

Denver’s Veterans Services Center opened in August of 2015 and is the first of its kind, serving veterans with housing, employment, benefits and support from a variety of veteran-serving programs all in one location. The beautiful, welcoming center offers veterans a single place to turn no matter their needs. Since its opening, it has become the go-to place for veterans and their families.

The Center’s mission is “To coordinate and expedite high-quality service delivery to service members, veterans, and associated family of all generations and backgrounds through the strategic co-location and collaboration of veteran-serving organizations at the Volunteers of America Bill Daniels Veteran Services Center.”

Currently, the Center hosts 12 different veteran-serving programs, including the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment, the DU Law Veteran Advocacy Project, the Financial Health Institute, the Patriot Anglers and more.

If you’d like to learn more about this important nonprofit service, please visit the Volunteers of America website.

How to Track Your Workouts

Tracking your workouts is important. It probably seems like an unnecessary chore, however, when you track your workouts you are essentially gathering data. As you look back at your data, you’ll be able to evaluate your workouts. You can see areas where you’ve made great improvements and areas where you need to modify or change your workout approach. Tracking your workouts is also a source of motivation and can help you identify when you’ve reached your goals.

What Do You Track?

• Distance – How far did you run, bike, walk, or roller skate? You might track this information if you’re working up to a distance. For example, if you’d like to be able to run a marathon, then you’ll track your distance and gain motivation and information as you gradually increase it.
• Pace – Pace means that you’re tracking your speed over distance. For example, you might run a ten-minute mile now and your goal might be to run an eight-minute mile. So you’ll track how your pace improves as you get into better shape. You can track this for running, walking, bicycling and anything else that can be tracked over a distance. Indoor fitness machines work for both distance and pace as well.
• Reps – If you’re doing strength training then you can track reps. You can also track reps for time. For example, you might be able to do five push-ups in a minute now and a month from now you might be able to do ten.
• Heart Rate – If you want to keep your heart rate in a certain zone then you’ll track your heart rate along with the type of workout that you’re performing.
• Calories – If you’re strictly looking for weight-loss results then tracking calories can be useful. You can compare calories burned with calories consumed and predict your weight loss. If your prediction is off, then you have information to help you resolve the discrepancy and figure out why.
• Time – Time is different from pace and it only applies to certain workouts. For example, let’s say you have a goal to do 100 push-ups. Maybe the first time you try this it takes 30 minutes. That’s your time. As your fitness improves, your time should decrease.