Get Active at Home

Disability Rights UK

tells us about their project to encourage disable people to get more active.

BEING physically active is important for everyone, with many positive benefits. It can help to improve your mental health, help to connect with others in your community, and help to relieve the symptoms of some health conditions. Disabled people often face more barriers than non-disabled people when it comes to getting physically active, and the pandemic has only exacerbated these barriers. The ‘Sport England Active Lives Coronavirus Report’ (Oct 2020), for example, shows that disabled people experienced a larger increase in inactivity levels, 56% of disabled people with 3 or more impairments are now inactive, rising by 11.2% from 2019.

The Get Yourself Active (GYA) team at Disability Rights UK wanted to find out more about the experiences of disabled people during this time and find ways to support them. GYA is a programme funded by Sport England and led by Disability Rights UK which works alongside disabled people and disabled people’s user led organisations to lead change in the social care, health and sport sectors. The aim is to improve health and wellbeing outcomes for disabled people.

We embarked on a research project with Sense and Durham University to find out more details about disabled peoples getting active experiences. We not only wanted to find out how people had been getting active, but also what resources had helped them and what they would like from future resources.

Our survey was completed by over 450 disabled adults from across the UK, and we interviewed 40 people about their experiences. We used these findings to codesign accessible and inclusive pre-recorded videos. Our videos cover a range of activities and all have captions and a British Sign Language interpreter to make them as accessible as possible.

We didn’t stop there! We knew there were a range of other organisations creating online get active resources, so we wanted to find a way to collectively make them available to disabled people at home. To showcase these resources, we created a new section of the Get Yourself Active website so that disabled people and people with long term health conditions can easily find resources to support their physical activity. We collected videos which individuals can find according to which activity they are interested in, such as dance, yoga and strength workouts. We also have pages dedicated to other resources, such as worksheets and downloads.

What started as a small research project during the first lockdown has grown into a larger, ongoing piece of work where we have a dedicated area on our website where people can access our own resources, and resources from other providers to support them during this time. Despite lockdown measures now easing and the country slowly returning to normal, we know through our work on the GYA programme that it will take longer for some people to return to gyms and group fitness classes. There are many reasons for this – fear, uncertainty, as well as many people discovering that being active at home might be easier or more enjoyable for them. Although we hope many disabled people can return to their communities to get active, we also realise that online resources will still be used for some time to come and hope that the Active @ Home resources and website continue to prove useful for disabled people who wish to exercise at home.

Website: disabilityrightsuk.org Twitter: @DisRightsUK Facebook: @disabilityrightsuk YouTube: DisabilityRightsUK1