PERFORM Centre, One Year Later
Concordia’s Research and Athletics Centre Gaining Ground
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From the outside, Concordia’s PERFORM Centre looks like your everyday gym, but inside is a research and community-based complex that is looking to break new ground in the field of health.
“The challenge has always been to find a place that is not fractured,” said Kevin Little, the centre’s Chief Administrative Officer. “It’s a facility where students can interact with the community and have the researchers there as well.”
Concordia students can get a one-semester membership for $60; to try it out for the month of December is $15.00. There are no extra membership fees and no need to commit to longer than that.
One of the reasons the membership is so cheap is because the people who use the gym become the pool of possible subjects when the researchers in the glass offices above the conditioning floor want to study something. Of course, that’s only if the gym-goer chooses to participate.
The centre’s mission is to promote long-term health through prevention. Researchers from different fields work in the ultra-modern facility.
“The exchange between the students, the community and the researchers speeds up the research projects as much as it speeds up the learning process for the community,” said Little.
The organization that runs the PERFORM Centre emphasizes giving back to Concordia students, and teaching is one of the ways they do it. Through internships, undergraduates learn by working with researchers and professionals in their field.
There’s also an athletic therapy clinic and a treatment centre run by Concordia’s athletic therapy students, who are supervised by certified athletic therapists. The clinic charges $25 per visit to students for treatments.
While PERFORM has the latest fitness technology to offer, it might disappoint a seasoned gym rat. There’s no bench press or squat machine, but Research Coordinator Axel Bergman said there’s a reason for that.“It’s a facility where students can interact with the community and have the researchers there as well.”
—Kevin Little, Chief Administrative Officer of the PERFORM Centre
“We’re really trying to promote healthy living and get the people who usually don’t go to gyms to come here. These people have different needs than the heavyweight lifters.”
Located across from Concordia’s Loyola Campus in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, the PERFORM Centre—which stands for Prevention, Evaluation, Rehabilitation, Formation—was inaugurated in October 2011 with the help of a $35-million investment from the Canadian government.
“The research we do is really varied—we’re looking at athletic therapies, chronic disease and common sports injuries like concussions. We’re also working on prevention and lifestyle behaviour studies,” explained Bergman.
“Because it takes time to collect data and analyze it, we’re only going to start having results in about a year and a half.”
Once researchers publish the studies’ results, the institution plans to share them with health agencies and via conferences and their website.
The PERFORM Centre isn’t only gaining momentum here in Montreal—other universities around the country are looking at it as a model.
“I was in British Columbia last summer and [the University of British Coumbia] had partnered up with a contractor to build a similar place to this, but you know it’s not easy to put together 40 million bucks,” said Bergman.
Even if it’s only a year old, Bergman has high expectations for the PERFORM Centre and his staff.
“I would like the Centre to have a world-class reputation for doing preventive health research and see researchers from all over the world working here together and giving the absolute best to our community,” he said.
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