Active Lifestyles

I have been a member of Ethos for over than 5 years now. I have been an ative member, attending a wide range of classes offered by the gym. Over the past year Energia team has introduced a whole new set of classes from circuit training to weight lifting !! Also, every now and then they arrange health weeks which includes lots of interesting nutrition seminars, range of free classes and free t-shirts!! So I recommend trying out any of their classes, you could have an hour of a proper core workout to get tight abs just in time for summer or go for boxing where you can get rid of all your stress for the day.

– By Zahra Sharif

Read Zahra’s experience with the Active Lifestyles Team in full

In July last year a strange couple wearing red t-shirts wheeled a cart through my office handing out fruit and leaflets advertising the weight management program. I was already a regular gym attender (5 times a week) but hadn’t got round to acting on my resolution to ‘try out a class sometime’. The next time I was at the gym I sought out a member of the active life styles team just to find out more.

I had no intention of singing up on the spot, I never do things like that, but this initial chat was with the most friendly, enthusiastic and knowledgeable fitness instructor I had met. (This was Shannon, she was also wearing a red t-shirt.) I didn’t believe a lot of what I was told (90% of health information including that from the NHS is wrong) but Shannon’s extensive knowledge (Well backed up by scientific studies and background knowledge) convinced me to at least find out and I walked out of the gym signed up to the Weight Management Program.

During the program I met the rest of the team and enthusiasm for fitness must be contagious as they all worked hard to encourage, help and push me to achieve more in my gym sessions. Soon the enthusiasm spread to me and I was doing fitness circuits, running round Hyde Park (in the running club), doing weights and even started attending (my now favourite) Grit classes. I learnt how to exercise properly radically changed my diet and did this all as part of the group of ‘regulars’ also on the program. Exercising with others massively increases the effort you put in.

It changed my gym experience forever and I will never go back to just hopping on a few machines. If you have one of these ‘resolutions’ to try a class one day I would recommend finding Shannon (home in on the red t-shirt) and having that conversation.

-By Robert Metcalf, Technical Project Services

Read Robert’s experience with the Active Lifestyles Team in full

Healthy Living Week 2014 was a true success with over 460 people attending the week. Imperial staff and students had full access to a wide range of free activities – ­body MOT’s, free classes, gym challenges, sports massage, nutrition and back pain management seminars were all on offer.

The gym challenge involved over a hundred people and was an exceptionally hard press-up challenge, 1 set 1 rep and so on. The pyramid only stopped if members couldn’t complete any more repetitions or were timed out on 10 minutes. Congratulations to Giulia Ferretti who won the women’s gym challenge and received a huge goodie bag of prizes! Giulia is a student at Imperial and a committee member of the Imperial Cheerleading team.

A huge thank you to Paul Smithhurst and Ali Al Ramahi, Ethos’ s very own personal trainers for providing online fitness support, sports massage and back pain assessment seminars. If you are interested in any personal training please contact activelistyles@Imperial.ac.uk for a referral. Michael our residential osteopath completed free postural assessments throughout the week coupled with some back and neck pain analysis.

Finally we had free classes galore and they were all brilliantly attended! Boxing, GRIT, salsa, spin and boot camps were ran throughout the week with fast classes running throughout the day in the gym. Ethos also teamed up with Les Mills who provided us with the resources to run a GRIT PLYO class. Thank you to Les Mills for allowing us to run this one off featured class.

The Active Lifestyles Team will be running new studio classes in the summer and more events across the year. If you would like to receive more specific information on our services, please contact our email address, actlifestyles@imperial.ac.uk

Read Healthy Living Week 2014 was a great success! in full