MH1 - Laying the Foundations

Here's an update on the progress of the fitness industry's mental health movement.....

Since the soft launch of MH1 we've made considerable progress with everything we set out to achieve. Our Facebook and LinkedIn communities are growing and are populated with fitness professionals and leaders from across the UK.

You can join us on facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/mh1uk

The vision for MH1 was always to provide a community or communities in which colleagues can openly discuss mental wellbeing and share articles, stories and programmes that help others. We also committed to create resources that could be used across the industry, most notably a suite of health campaign resources and a more ambitious Mental Health PARQ.

Our free to use campaigns (funded by Matrix Fitness and professionally designed by our friends at Cornerstone Design and Marketing) will be ready to download from February 1st, in fact they are ready now but we've purposely held back due to the impact of the new lockdown. We start with one campaign per month for six months and we want every single fitness professional and organisation to make use of these simple, free and media friendly images.

With regards to the new Mental Health PARQ we are collaborating with the very best. We are already working with a clinician team from the NHS and we now have the support of a university (more to come on that soon!) to develop a validated mental wellbeing questionnaire.

We believe the process of validation is a crucial step in the rollout of the document - this involves a robust evaluation of the questions, market testing and then a further assessment of the results.

We are delighted to say that we are on track to launch the pilot with a small group of Operators in April - subject to pandemic restrictions of course.

Thank you to everyone who has supported us since we announced MH1 back in December and please remember that everything we do with regards to exercise starts and ends in the mind.

Graeme