Enhancing Health and Physical Activity Rates through Pentathlon (EHPARP) aims at employing Pentathlon as a tool of promoting health-enhancing physical activity among the European youth and adult populations as well as providing dual career opportunities to Athletes in the individual disciplines forming part of Pentathlon practice who will be empowered as Coaches/Trainers in their disciplines and in comprehensive programmes of Pentathlon for an adult and a youth audience.
The project is targeted at the following categories, as both direct and ultimate target groups:
- Young people aged 18-30 not practising Sport and motivated to approach physical activity and Sport practice through Pentathlon.
- Adults aged 31-55 who are not taking part in Sport and wish to approach Pentathlon as an instrument of physical activity and well-being/active ageing.
EHPARP capitalises on the potential of grassroots Sport as an agent of promoting the positive effect of physical activity on health and education as well as the wider dimension of Sport practice as an agent for conveying positive values of fair-play, compliance with the rules of the game, mutual respect, solidarity and discipline along the lines identified by the European Commission in its 2007 European Work Paper on Sport and confirmed in the Communication on Developing the European Dimension in Sport (2011).
Enhancing awareness and active participation in grassroots Pentathlon programs calls for a cooperation between Sport organisations, where the theoretical and practical input on the specific processes and challenges of Sport, and NGOs, which can complement the dimensions of outreach, attractively and educational impact on a wide audience of targets, from the youth to adults, through the input of non-formal learning techniques.