Summer Series Episode 1

And the fact that, again, to...

I go out for a walk every day and bring my husband along so that he gets a bit of exercise.

Now, it's not a massive walk, just be half an hour, but usually out to Tramore and we get the fresh sea air.

Lovely.

We're lucky to be able to do that.

We are.

Yeah.

And Louise, we've mentioned there Exwell and the active ageing.

Would you be able to give a little more context around those and what they are?

Sure.

So the Exwell programme was something we ran initially, but we kind of discovered that the logistics of organising it was getting a little bit beyond what we were able to do while doing our other jobs full time.

So after Covid, UPMC here in Waterford took over the running of the Exwell programme and they formed a steering committee, which includes members of our department and the arena.

and UPMC and the idea is that we kind of we get access to the people for students but also for research.

So we kind of they do they run the Exwell class and then we can kind of feed into it with students to kind of offer some exercise consultation skills or exercise consultations to the participants and you know maybe help them to do the sort of develop the kind of the lifestyle change aspect of it.

So that is kind of one thing.

And so once that happened, I was a bit like, oh, I don't have direct access to people anymore, which meant it just made my job a little bit harder.

So last year in, I suppose, in anticipation of COVID being over and needing people again, I set up an active aging group in collaboration with the gym in the arena so that we could have our own group of people who were healthy older adults or who had been through the Exwell program and had kind of graduated from it and were ready to kind of move on to independent exercise.

So we set it up about a year ago and we kind of recruited.

And the first time we did it, we had a small number of people.

And we're on our third running of it now.

And, you know, it was very well subscribed this time.

And no more than any other programme, we've kind of adapted and evolved in terms of what we're after.

So what we try to do is provide a one-to-one experience for the participants with a student.

So they work with one student over six to eight weeks to become more independent in the gym.

So that's our aim with the students is... that they design a gym programme for this older adult and they instruct them, but they instruct them so that at the end of it they can confidently come into the gym and work on their own.