PHYSICAL ACTIVITY
MATCH FIT
Exercise doesn’ t just improve physical health, it also provides structure, routine and connection with others, says Daniel Floyd – all of which are vital parts of recovery
The Get Connected programme supports Turning Point clients in its central London services, and began in 2010 with a single weekly park fit session in partnership with an organisation called British Military Fitness.
I joined Turning Point in 2011 as a recovery worker and started supporting on the programme. When the opportunity came to lead it, I wanted to put into practice my vision of integrating exercise and fitness with substance use recovery programmes. I’ d always had an interest in personal fitness training, and by 2015 I’ d become a personal trainer and was keen to bring my skills to the service. My goal was to help people move on with their lives by channelling their focus on sport and exercise. The programme now has daily sessions attended by up to 80 clients per week – sometimes more. As we keep expanding our activities and more of our services find out about the programme we expect these numbers to keep growing, and we’ ve also built relationships with local organisations such as the royal parks, Kensington Palace, Chelsea FC and the Fit For Life youth boxing club, enabling us to run a wide range of sport and exercise sessions. We have various womenonly programmes at our central London services and we decided to build on this by having a women-only park fit session, as we know that the experiences of many of the women we support mean they don’ t want to be in fitness sessions with men, at least initially. We also piloted a women-only residential trip to the South Downs, which was incredibly successful.
RANGE OF ACTIVITIES We have fitness, yoga and arts and crafts sessions at the Clore Learning Centre at Kensington Palace – a warm and welcoming space where we have a particular focus on supporting people who are sleeping rough, homeless, or coming out of hostels. It was also a real coup when we agreed a partnership with a private tennis club in Hyde Park to provide free training sessions with coaches and equipment – these have become very popular with the people we support.
Our partnership with Chelsea FC sees our clients taking part in coaching sessions at Regent’ s Park, and the club also gives us tickets to matches and invited us to their Christmas party for the organisations they support. Some of the other sessions we run include boxing, swimming and badminton, as well as park runs every Saturday and Sunday.
The programme helps build new and safe relationships. People interact with others in recovery, as well as peer mentors, programme leads and coaches. They get to take responsibility for their own wellbeing and support others who are new to the programme.
Numerous studies have shown that exercise has a positive effect on people in recovery. Researchers at Université de Montréal looked at 43 studies,
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