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Sport Relief – Do yourself proud!

If you’ve shopped at a particular supermarket recently or watched your favourite TV shows, you’ll probably know that Sport Relief is back this month.  Sport Relief is a biennial charity event from Comic Relief, in association with BBC Sport, which brings together the worlds of sport and entertainment to raise money to help vulnerable people in both the UK and the world’s poorest countries.

There will be over 1,000 running, cycling and swimming events across the UK and it culminates in the Sport Relief Games from the weekend of 18-20th March.  As we approach Spring, Sport Relief is a great way of getting active, getting fit and having fun whilst raising money for those in need.

Sport Relief Walk Run Swim Cycle Yourself Proud
Sport Relief – Walk Run Swim Cycle Yourself Proud

Encourage your employees to take part will help foster motivation and encourage a team spirit throughout your organisation.  There are details below on how you can take part but, for your employees who aren’t sporty, how do you convince them to take part?

The hardest part of getting staff active again, is simply to get them going. ‘It’s cold’, ‘It’s dark’, ‘No time’, ‘It’s going to be hard’, ‘I can’t be bothered’. The list goes on and whilst we all experience these constraints and barriers from time to time, helping employees to take that first step  is the best way to start.  You could persuade staff to go for a walk at lunchtime.  Run a pedometer challenge and get staff to hit 10k steps per day (you can download free pedometers on nearly all smart phones).  Encourage staff to take the stairs and not the lift.  There are literally dozens of ways to get your organisation moving and having some fun!
On a personal level, one of the easiest ways of becoming more active is to find something you enjoy doing, and if possible include family and friends to make it a more social, enjoyable experience. Nothing feels too difficult if you’re having a good time whilst doing it! Couple that in with doing something for a good cause and that will leave you feeling great at the end is even better!

If you’re starting with a low fitness base, there are a few things to keep in mind before starting – firstly,  get a health check (we can help here!) just to make sure is safe to begin a new exercise or activity program. Build up your activity levels slowly; don’t feel you need to run a 3 miler straight away! Ease the body in initially and go from there.

Setting time, steps or distance targets to achieve each day is a much more effective way of increasing your activity time per week rather than just stating ‘I will exercise more’, or ‘I want to be fitter’.  Making use of apps, pedometers, a Fitbit(which you can coincidentally win from signing up to Sports Relief!) is also a fun and easy way to keep track of how much you move each day.
150 minutes of moderate activity per week is the current minimum recommendations for aerobic activity, can you break this into 15-30 minute bite sized pieces over the course of the day to help tick this off? You’ll still receive similar benefits health wise by splitting your activity into 3 x 10 minute blocks as you will with 1 x 30 minute block, so if time’s an issue this is a great way around that barrier.
For more information on getting involved in Sports Relief and how to ‘Walk, Run, Swim, or Cycle yourself Proud’, please visit:
sportrelief.com
youtube.com/sportrelief
facebook.com/sportrelief

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