Get Moving Whaddon

James White, Pioneer Minister in Whaddon joined Richard Atkins on BCC Radio Gloucestershire on Sunday to talk about Get Moving Whaddon.

It’s a project funded by Active Gloucestershire to help the community with their physical wellbeing. Cornerstone took the money and set up the project by finding Patrick and Laura, two sports professionals from the community to lead Zoom sessions.

James said, “Get Moving Whaddon is all about building a community of strong, healthy, moving people who can support each other into better health and happiness.

“Both Patrick and Laura are completely committed to seeing people move from strength to strength. Join them in person or on Zoom to discover new levels of health and strength for yourself.”

And this winning formula seems to be getting results. The participants sign up for a combination of real life, socially distances events (when safe to do so) and also Zoom classes, and there are lots of happy people who are seeing real results in their lives.

“There’s not a huge amount of IT at home in this community, particularly anything with a decent sized screen. We managed to get some funding to pay for people to have IT. We did a big roll out early on in lockdown getting laptops to secondary school children and nice little Kindle tablets to primary school children to help them with their work. We’ve also distributed some laptops to people to help them get onto the Zoom classes for Get Moving Whaddon.”

Some of the perks that people discuss are how helpful it is in maintaining friendships, a reason for getting up and getting going in the morning, increased flexibility and strength, with one lady saying “I’m supple now… well suppler! I’ll get there!” and another participant saying, “Most of the time I’m pain free now and I’m absolutely thrilled.”

People of all abilities have been joining in. Here’s what they had to say about the experience.