The University of Southampton

Tag: National Fitness Day

Celebrating a week of achievement

Posted on by Sian Bryant

Well what a week we have had! We felt a huge sense of achievement as the LifeLab team successfully completed their #LifeLabGoesWalking challenge to mark National Fitness Day.

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We decided to practice what we preach and set ourselves the goal of walking to the furthest school to have signed up to the LifeLab project – which turned out to be in Birmingham!

We gave ourselves a week to do it, combining all our collective steps, captured on LifeLab fitness trackers, the same ones we use in our Early LifeLab programme to show how many active minutes are being notched up.

As we set off, our team had some thoughts about how they felt about the 130 mile challenge. Donna, who delivers the LifeLab teaching, said: “Excited! It’s a good thing I have a conveniently timed half marathon while we are completing the challenge.”

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Hannah, our Early LifeLab lead said: “I’m looking forward to putting all the steps I do running after a toddler to good use!”

Kate, lead for attainment for LifeLab, said she was: “Really excited to see how far we can go! The school run will be put to good use!” Lisa Bagust, who also delivers LifeLab teaching, said her fitbit was charged and ready to go!

Claire our technician said she would be mostly dancing her way through it, while Sian, who supports with communications, was just hoping her knees held out for the duration. Kath, our programme leader found a way to combine the steps with expanding her mind. She said: “I am looking forward to having a chance to listen to Sarah Jayne Blakemore’s fabulous book ‘Inventing ourselves; the secret life of the teenage brain’ whilst I’m walking up to Brum!”maptwitter1

We actually made it in record time to Nelson Mandela Primary School, who were also midway through their own activity challenge. They had set themselves the goal of combining the miles they accumulated through their mile a day initiative to make it down to Southampton and visit us here in LifeLab.

We must have virtually past them somewhere on the A34!!

As we had exceeded our own walking expectations we thought rather than call it a day, we would simply extend the challenge to take us around Birmingham and visit some more schools who have also recently signed up to the LifeLab programme.

The City of Birmingham (COB) school campuses are spread out across the city and gave us another 26 miles to add to our total before we started heading back to Southampton, which we managed to hit bang on time in the middle of National Fitness Day last Wednesday. We celebrated with a mass workout joined by our visiting students from Havant Academy who threw themselves into the challenge and gave us some much needed support as we entered the home straight.

The day was a great celebration of the value of fitness and activity and one that we wholeheartedly embraced by the LifeLab community.selfie-board-team

We’re off! Why we were inspired to ‘walk’ to Birmingham

Posted on by Sian Bryant

Today the LifeLab team embarks on an energetic challenge in support of National Fitness Day. Read about how we came up with the idea, and what will inspire us to keep up the step count

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“I’ve got an idea,” said Kath.

It’s the way all the best conversations start in the LifeLab office. Albeit this one began on email as inspiration was striking at a conference some 80 miles away.

To be fair, you would be hard pushed not to be spurred into action if you were anywhere near the ukactive National Summit event. Speaker after speaker took to the stage calling for more action to promote healthy and active lifestyles.

 

Levels of inactivity combined with poor diet and changes in how we socialise have combined to build a worrying picture of our nation’s health, both now and in the future.

Allowing young people to investigate their own lifestyles and make informed choices through scientific discovery is what underpins the work of LifeLab, so the message that we could all take up the challenge of leading healthier lifestyles really it home. It also hit Kath.

“I think we need to do something for National Fitness Day,” she continued.

National Fitness Day is, as it suggests, a country-wide movement to try and get the public doing just that – moving!

It is a chance to highlight the role physical activity plays in improving health and encompasses all manner of activity from organised classes, to individual challenges and mass events.

Before long our support for this event had resulted in a plan to ‘walk’ to the school that was the furthest away from LifeLab. By wearing activity trackers we would, as a team, combine our steps over a number of days to cover the distance required.

As it turned out that school, Nelson Mandela Primary, was in Birmingham. Brilliant. A quick calculation concluded we needed to give ourselves at least a week to rack up enough steps to cover the equivalent of the 130 miles it would take to get there.

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And so it begins. Today is the day we start counting those steps, with the aim of reaching our destination in time for National Fitness Day on Wednesday 26 September. Finding ways to substitute car journeys for walking, taking the stairs instead of the lift, or just heading out for a stroll around the block will be the lifestyle of choice for the next seven days. Wish us luck!

 

Keep track of our progress as we march towards the midlands by following this blog here, and the team on social media. Find us @LifeLabSoton under #LifeLabGoesWalking as part of the #Fitness2Me campaign.