Our story
The “grass roots movement” movement
Gill and Mary are sisters, and mothers to young children. They wanted to get fitter and stronger so they asked Gill’s husband Andrew, who is a personal trainer, to help them with some training programmes. They also live rurally, so any workouts needed to be outside, whatever the weather.
Week 1 went really well, motivation was high and everyone was feeling GREAT!
But as the muscle ache grew, so too did the excuses, and by week three they had both lost the will to continue.
So, they invited their friends Kat and Jody to join - it’s much harder to cancel once you have others signed up too. Kat and Jody just kept turning up.
A few months went by and friends of friends said they would like to join too and slowly but surely we’d grown to a group of over 20 mums chucking logs in the woods. Then, the husbands were jealous of all the fun we were having so they started turning up too.
National lockdowns didn’t stop us, as we transitioned to a weekly combination of online group workouts (hosted by members Megan and Will), personal progression challenges and outdoor sessions with a partner.
Strong friendships, stronger bodies, strong cup of tea afterwards
Once the group got big we thought we’d probably better formalise and work out what we’re all about.
We realised that what we’d actually created was a fantastic support network. A group of people who will turn up, whatever the weather and who are there for each other.
We know that we will see our friends at a group class and we also know that if we break our leg in three places (this actually happened!) we have people on our doorstep to help.
How can we build movement into our daily lives?
Andrew spent years working in gyms and found them pretty strange places. He also spent part of his career teaching personal trainers, he felt like the courses lost sight of how to get people moving more and building exercise into their lives for the long term.
We don’t like the idea of training to be in the military. We tried a few bootcamps and we felt like they didn’t teach any real skills and after a while we couldn’t see that we were getting any better.
We spend a lot of time keeping on top of the latest sports science and public health reserach and keep asking ourselves:
How can we build exercise and movement into people’s lives so that it becomes part of their life?
How can this also help them to spend more time outdoors with people?
Spread the knowledge
We like the idea of giving people the skills to teach themselves and others. We never enjoyed going to classes where we felt like we didn’t have agency, where we couldn’t understand “the why?”
Our classes always have a segment on peer coaching where we spend time learning a new skill or movement.
We developed our training course which allows us to train our members to be certified WildStrong coaches. This means that Kat (Margot’s mum and teacher by day) or Andy (Ellie’s dad and Anaesthetist by day) can be WildStrong coaches by night.
It also allows us to bring WildStrong to more communities around the UK – check out our locations.
We’ve become Wilder and Stronger since the early days, but we still believe in the natural high that comes from working out in the great outdoors and that we are stronger together.