Walking with Purpose: Tom Bosworth motivating the community to get walking

There are many barriers preventing people from exercising, including cost, or confidence. Tom Bosworth MBE, record-breaking GB race walker, has created the Walking with Purpose programme to help overcome these. He recently launched a third programme in partnership with Fitmums and Friends. We caught up with them following the launch to find out more.

Creating a walking programme for all

Tom recognised the barriers that many people faced when looking to start exercising, so wanted to make the programme as simple and accessible as possible for people to get involved and given his sporting career, walking is already something he is passionate about.

“I wanted to pitch walking as a form of movement rather than exercise and so, starting with a basic 15 minutes of walking regularly I thought how could I make this truly accessible. The “minute by minute guide” was born. Starting at a predetermined time (say 15mins) the participant would simply add on a minute every day or every time they walked.

“The only rule is they have to walk continuously for that duration, it can’t be split up through the day. If the participant does this for two weeks, starting at 15minutes then by just adding one minute a day, they’ve hit thirty minutes of walking every day. Genuinely life changing for those that had stopped any form of exercise.”

Collaborating with Fitmums and Friends

For the most recent launch of this programme, Tom collaborated with Fitmums and Friends, who are a friendly, sociable and supportive running club empowering everyone of all abilities to experience the benefits of being active. Their impact on the community has just been celebrated with a King's Award for Voluntary Service. Whilst the club are based out of the North East of England, the programme can be completed remotely to make it even more accessible.

“Fitmums and Friends agreed to host the third pilot,” Tom told us, “to act not only as another form of getting those in their communities active but hopefully an entry point for those on the programme to potentially move up to any of their walking or running groups if they have the confidence to do so.”

“This is the third pilot I’ve got running, we hoped twenty would sign up, we ended up with 92!”

On the benefits of Walking with Purpose, Sam Barlow, Founder and Chief Officer of Fitmums and Friends added,

“We hope to motivate and inspire people to use this programme to simply move more.  We want people to know that walking is good enough - it is a wonderful activity which can reap incredible health benefits and we want to support and encourage this with our weekly contact to help motivation.”

This programme is already having a real impact on the everyday lives of those taking part. One participant described the impact on their life,

"Walking with Purpose is making me get out and walk even when it's raining! I love the push to be active every day - I needed that. Living on my own - the days can be lonely, but my walk breaks the day up and I feel so much better for it."

Alongside this programme, Tom has set himself the personal goal of running 10k faster than he could walk it as a professional athlete. Sam speaks of the merits of having such an inspirational role model, like Tom, kicking off and heading up the programme.

“Tom is such an inspiring individual with a wealth of athletic achievements, but he is also incredibly motivating to ordinary people like us. He is a passionate advocate for the incredible health benefits of walking and making everyone feel capable of something. We are so delighted to support Tom's campaign to improve health outcomes through this programme.”

Aspiring to expand the programme

With three successful launches under his belt, Tom has big ambitions for the future of the programme,

“My aim is to take this to the government and get walking prescribed within GPs and other with other health practitioners. Directly impacting so many people, their physical health, mental health and bringing a sense of community as we’ve seen with the three launches we’ve done so far.”

Getting active

Sam’s advice to anyone struggling for motivation to get active is to,

“Come and join Walking with Purpose! You set your own goals and build from your own personal starting point, then add a minute of walking a day. You do it in your own time so you can fit it around your life. And if you struggle for motivation the team at Fitmums and Friends are here to help!”