Member Article

Best foot forward for Orbit and Life Leisure

A team from Orbit Developments in Stockport is putting its best foot forward on a new fitness and wellbeing initiative in collaboration with Life Leisure.

Life Leisure is a not-for-profit social enterprise company focused on promoting the benefits of a healthy, active lifestyle via its 15 health and fitness centres and other sports and leisure products and initiatives across Stockport.

The tie up with Orbit Developments’ Stockport team will see 15 employees adopt Life Leisure’s actiLIFE technology programme, which uses a combination of an ‘accelerometer’ plus web-based monitoring and remote coaching to stimulate greater physical activity.

actiLIFE is aimed at people who would describe themselves as ‘inactive’. The aim is to encourage participants to be more active by making them more aware of their activity levels.

Rachael Maddox, Marketing Assistant for Orbit Developments, said the idea had gone down well with colleagues. “It’s a great time of year to be talking about getting fit, and the prospect of trialling out some new wearable technology is really exciting. Our team has a variety of roles from building management to leasing surveyors and it will be interesting to see where they start out and how far they can get with the ‘pebble’.”

According to research by Price Waterhouse Coopers, the annual cost of sickness absence has climbed to £29 billion for UK organisations.

Keen to drive a positive culture of health and wellbeing at work, Orbit have invited Life Leisure to present the actiLIFE initiative to their customers at their next networking morning at Regent House.

Rachael Maddox again: “We have hundreds of people working on our 12 offices across Stockport who might benefit from a more active lifestyle. By trialling actiLIFE ourselves we are in a much better position to talk about it to our customers in due course.”

Michelle Childs, Senior Physical Activity Development Officer at Life Leisure, said, “We are thrilled that Orbit Developments are taking part in actiLIFE. We hope that the programme will have many benefits for everyone who is taking part and through providing motivating group and individual challenges and online support, participants will see improvements in their overall health and wellbeing.”

Orbit Developments’ actiLIFE trial will run for 12 weeks, with participants’ progress being measured at the half way and end stages by the Life Leisure team.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by James Welton .