Being a programme that supports the fitness industry to become more inclusive, the Inclusive Fitness Initiative (IFI) caters for the needs of both disabled and non-disabled people. Through a range of projects and equipment the initiative has supported facilities across the UK to create an inclusive service increasing participation by disabled people.
The aim of the initiative is to make fitness centres and gyms accessible to all people with disability, no matter it's physical, mental or sensory. The IFI's scheme is unique in the world today, absolutely central in the design of physical equipment by many of the leading firms across the world of manufacturing companies.
With the significant support of sport lottery funding, IFI broke the cycling of action that previous existed in fitness industry, and conducted in-depth research to understand why disabled people were not accessible in fitness service in public sector facilities, especially why the participation rates of disabled people were significant lower than the non-disabled people.
With some nine million pounds invested by the government on this initiative, IFI has interacted with the facilities it worked with. It was very important to have areas of intervention to provide a holistic solution. Top of that list was the development of inclusive fitness equipment, because this was the primary initial output from the research: there was no fitness equipment available for disabled people to get full body workout in the gym.
It is very important to make sure that the disabled people understand the benefit of a healthy life style, and many disabled people don't feel at ease when doing physical workout in a gym with non-disabled people. Once the disabled people find the benefit of a healthy life style and enjoy taking part in fitness environment, IFI will also encourage them to take on other complementary physical activities and sports.
Currently, there are 186 facilities in the UK accredited by the IFI. The very positive output from this initiative was that a total of 370,000 disabled people visited those facilities in 2007. With the expansion of the initiative, the figure will be expected to hit 571,000 in 2008. It is worth mentioning that nearly 50 percent of those users never used the gym before.
In the facilities IFI works with, seven percent of all the users in those facilities are disabled people. 12 percent of the new users (people conducting exercises for the first time) are disabled people. Another key feature of this initiative is the fact that IFI wishes to welcome all disabled people regardless of their impairment. A very important point to be able to develop facilities for disabled people is to speak to the disabled and take onboard their views, what they require from the equipment.
The positive outcome from this programme is 96 percent of all the disabled people who use the facilities will recommend their experiences to other people. Additionally, 50 percent of all disabled people that use the IFI facilities visit those facilities twice or more a week. And the average of non-disabled people visits 1.3 times a week.
To echo the huge demand from disabled gym users, IFI has trained 5,000 staff for those facilities and 1,500 fitness instructors are confident to deliver exercise programmes, which is important to complement the equipment.
The IFI has been working with equipment suppliers and manufacturers to ensure that the gyms across the UK are fully accessible for disabled and their work will be promoted at Beijing Olympics and Paralympics this summer.
This year, 40,000 people with disability will benefit from the initiative by using 186 accredited facilities in the UK. That number of people using these gyms will hopefully double by the end of 2008 thanks to the strong market excellence, and by 2012, the year when London hosts the Olympics, up to 1,000 will be accredited.
By People's Daily Online
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