Last night’s GoodGym session took us to lend a hand at Cultivate London, a charity doing vital work transforming unused urban land into thriving green spaces and training grounds for young people pursuing careers in horticulture and landscaping.

Cultivate London has recently had to relocate to a new site, and our job was to help them get settled in. That meant one thing - some serious heavy lifting! Our Tasks Included:

• Hauling office furniture up flights of stairs into a temporary cabin
• Shifting large furniture pieces into a huge shipping container
• Transporting heavy equipment
• Carefully moving plants and growing materials to their new homes

Given the stairs we had to go up and done countless times and all the lifting, it was a proper full-body workout!

We made a huge dent in what would have taken days for a small team to complete – and Cultivate London were really appreciative. Your energy and effort made a real difference!

Wood You Believe It? A Busy Evening at Strand on the Green! 🌳🪚🎨

What a fantastic evening we had last night at Strand on the Green School, where our mission was to protect some of the school’s outdoor wooden structures with a fresh coat of wood preserver and to tame the overgrowth that had taken over parts of the car park!

We kicked things off with a warm welcome to Sara ** – benvenuta! 🌟 So lovely to have you join us for your very first GoodGym session – we hope it’s the first of many.

There was plenty to cheer about before we got stuck in: 👏 Steph completed an ultra at the weekend – massive congratulations! 💪 And Eloise is gearing up for a half iron(wo)man this coming weekend – sending all the luck and power your way!

Armed with brushes, gloves, and secateurs, we split into teams and got straight to work. One group got busy painting and preserving the wooden structures, while the other tackled the overgrown bushes that were creeping into the car park. The transformation was impressive – big impact in a short time!

Once the task was complete, we rounded off the evening with a fitness session in the school grounds. It was a spicy mix of cardio and conditioning, with Emily, our reigning Queen of Planks, showing us all how it’s done! 🏋️‍♀️🔥

Looking ahead, we’ve got a fun mission coming up – we’ll be helping to marshal for the West London Queer Project’s 10km charity walk. It promises to be a joyous event.

Thanks to everyone who came along. Next week, Michelle will be leading the group at the Comboni Centre for some peaceful and mindful gardening. Don’t miss it!

For the second week in a row, we had the pleasure of celebrating a GoodGym birthday – this time, a very happy birthday to Florian! 🥳

We've started a new tradition where the birthday person gets to choose the fitness session – so what did Florian go for? Legs? Arms? Conditioning? Nothing at all? You'll have to read on...

We enjoyed the beautiful early summer's evening as we headed down to the drawdock, where our job for the evening was to clear the area of the plastic and other rubbish that pollutes our waterways. These riverbanks can collect all sorts of debris, and cleaning them is crucial – it protects local wildlife, improves the water quality, and helps keep our city clean.

Armed with litter pickers courtesy of Active 360, we got to work – and it wasn’t long before the weird and not-so-wonderful bits and pieces started turning up. Amid the usual suspects (bottles, wrappers, and mystery items), we found a surprising number of old metal pieces. Chris – clearly the group's secret scaffolding expert – identified them as scaffolding fittings. But how they ended up in the river is anybody's guess.

We divided everything we found into recycling and non reclyclables and filled several bags with rubbish. Great work, team.

Then it was time to find out Florian’s birthday fitness choice... and the decision was... Tabata!

Three tough 2-minute rounds of high-intensity exercises, with 20 seconds of effort and 10 seconds of rest – we did half burpees, sumo squats, power lunges and more. Not even the stunning river views could distract us from the burn. But as always, we powered through it together.

After a run back to base and some much-needed stretches, the birthday evening was celebrated in the best possible way: at the pub, with Florian’s amazing air fryer cake.

Looking for a weekend challenge? We’ve got a massive session coming up this Saturday in Battersea and we need all the help we can get. It’s going to be a great task, followed by a well-deserved social – the perfect post-parkrun, pre weekend activity!

Due to some last minute changes, for our regular trip to Chiswick House last night we were to be unsupervised for our task - but thankfully left with plenty of instructions, a map, and some tools.

We're generally a well behaved bunch (except for when photoshop is involved!) so we followed our directive to the letter and set off into the grounds of the house and garden.

At first glance there wasn't much litter to be found, but when we started looking a bit closer there was plenty to keep us busy. Around each bench there were dozens of cig butts to collect (these take 60 years to decompose and the particles get into our waterways...grim) and some more interesting finds including abandoned frisbees and a dog harness.

After a good stint we downed tools and headed to an unsuitable location for our fitness session - not sure why I selected there when we had the whole park at our disposal! Still, we cracked on with three different exercises for three different areas - legs, arms and cardio. The moves made for some excellent photos!

Next week we're off to help Wild Chiswick - hope to see you there!