A shared vision with GM Active to encourage more people to be more active in pursuit of better health, wellbeing and fitness makes The Great Outdoor Gym Company Activate Ltd a logical Strategic Business Partner for us.
The Great Outdoor Gym Company Activate Ltd (TGO Activate) has been pioneering outdoor fitness equipment, safety standards, and technology on a worldwide stage since 2007.
It says it is proud to put community health and sustainability at the core of the business and that’s the reason it does what it does.
Here, TGO’s co-founder and joint Managing Director, Georgie Delaney MBE, discusses why the business has joined our Strategic Business Partner programme and gives us an insight into how she sees our partnership benefiting both parties, the population of Greater Manchester and ultimately the planet.
Greater Manchester with the city of Manchester at its core is renowned for its sporting prowess and while that is important to us, we are also great admirers of the whole momentum to get the population of the city-region moving by increasing the levels of physical activity.
We feel Greater Manchester is a really good fit with TGO because our mission has always been to get people more active and healthier via our outdoor gyms that are free to use and accessible due to their locations in local parks.
We work with cities worldwide, including Singapore, Hong Kong, and London and we very much feel like Manchester’s potential for outdoor gyms is untapped.
We first found out about GM Active, and the Manchester moving momentum, through one of our non-executive directors, who has been following developments here for a long time and it was he who pointed out the synergy between TGO and what’s happening in GM.
So far, I would say we are at the start of our journey.
We’re hoping to bring a different perspective to GM Active, which is all around local parks and how you can use these open spaces to provide an alternative and, most notably, a low cost opportunity to get more people, more families, engaged in physical activity.
We are also great supporters of the growing trend of calisthenics – a form of exercise that dates back to the ancient Greeks that uses a person’s body weight. The exercises include things like pull-ups, chin-ups, push-ups, crunches, and burpees. It became really popular during lockdown and the trend has carried on growing.
Another area we’ve been really developing over the last few years is what we call movement medicine, working with physiotherapists to develop the movement medicine gym. It can be used in healthy hearts classes, stability classes and in a programme called Move Type 2, which is tailored towards people who are prediabetic or have diabetes and are managing it.
It’s interesting to see how these programmes use our equipment and how you can blend different worlds together and create something that’s good for a variety of different needs.
We have many, many examples of what we’ve already achieved on our website, where we feature case studies as exemplars of what we can do.
I definitely feel like we can bring family-friendly activity to the parks with a high quality leisure facility in open spaces.
We have a higher aspiration about what we can actually do with outdoor gym set-ups and doing it really well by spending a bit more than is normally spent on outdoor gyms. Our philosophy as a company is making our outdoor gyms inclusive and safe for all users, which is why we were asked to set a British standard for this type of equipment.
It is sometimes hard to find activities to do as a family – that’s why McDonald’s is so successful! But we can change that by creating something that is a quality time experience for the whole family in the parks, where they can be together. I think more parents are wanting to do more fitness and so to do it as a family is a win for all.
It’s great to create an environment whereby the whole family can get active together. An outdoor gym environment is a different opportunity to develop, so I feel like we can help everyone think outside the box to help achieve GM Active’s goals, but in an outdoor environment as well as indoors.
We’d like GM Active to help us get some blueprint projects off the ground that are really going to be showcases not only for Greater Manchester but for the UK and for the world – we very much have a vision of healthy people, healthy planet.
The way we want to achieve this is to empower local populations to run the gym in the park, not only running fitness sessions, but perhaps having little picking and other activities in and around the gym that the whole family can do together that will get people moving but also gets people looking after the parks.
One of our core values is inclusivity, encouraging everyone – men, women, children, young people, older people to all get involved.
We’d like GM Active to work with us on establishing a show site and supporting us with the activation so that it’s properly executed by benefiting from GM Active’s experience to help us develop a model that is scalable to help other communities.
Championing more active lifestyles across Greater Manchester to create a healthier population is admirable, so too is its Pivot to Active Wellbeing to encourage the use of publicly run leisure facilities and services to support those living with long term-health conditions.
If you want to know more about The Great Outdoor Gym Company, head to their website here.
