Background: During Covid and with the resulting huge focus on accessing virtual exercise; the lack of face to face Healthy Lifestyles physical activity sessions; Joe Wicks being the nation’s PE teacher etc. the fabulous Torbay & South Devon NHS Foundation Trust's Healthy Lifestyles team developed Facebook live physical activity sessions (which we nicknamed “Torbay’s Joe Wicks) for open access to the people of our community and beyond.
The Facebook Live sessions started at the beginning of July 2020 and include a wide range of activity types (chair-based exercise, Pilates, 1980s "old skool aerobics", HIIT circuits etc.). The team hopes to broaden the offer to include other elements of the Healthy Lifestyles portfolio (healthy eating, mental health, smoking cessation etc.) in the future too.
Before we started the sessions - one of the physical activity specialists, Elaine – said that if more than 3 people view each session, she would be pleased as that’s the average number of people who attend the face to face weight management groups that she ran pre-covid. Imagine our surprise and delight that - only 2 and a half weeks and 15 sessions later - the physical activity sessions have been viewed over 4,500 times! We are looking to make this offering a permanent part of our service.
How to access the sessions - communications information:
Torbay’s Healthy Lifestyles team is running free FaceBook Live physical activity sessions to help people get moving, get active and get healthy! Anyone and everyone is welcome to join in a wide variety of sessions (for example, Pilates, chair-based exercise, ‘old skool’ 1980s aerobics, and much more) and we would love for the people of Torbay and South Devon to join us.
The beauty of Facebook Live is that you can join from wherever you like (home, garden, anywhere!), you don’t have to share your screen to participate, you can choose from a wide variety of session types and you can take part in either the live sessions or via the recorded sessions at a later stage.
All you need to do to take part in these sessions is to follow the Torbay Healthy Lifestyles FaceBook page https://www.facebook.com/Torba... to find the session calendar and all the information about how to join.
For further information, please contact the team via https://www.torbayandsouthdevo... or by telephoning 0300 456 1006.
“Silver lining spotting” is sometimes tricky and feels impossible in some occasions, but this has easily been the silver lining for our team.