Green2Gold: Piloting “Team GB Family Activity Trails” for improving green exercise engagement and wellbeing in the East Riding of Yorkshire

Despite the well-known benefits of physical activity and exercise engagement, physical inactivity remains a worldwide pandemic (Hall et al., 2021). Green space exposure and green exercise participation can elicit a range of physical health (Twohig-Bennett & Jones, 2018) and mental wellbeing benefits at a community level (Coventry et al., 2021) and may be a promising avenue for engaging people in free, easily accessible, local physical activity. In order to increase complex behaviours such as physical activity, a systems approach should be taken to account for individual, intrapersonal, organisational, and environmental levels of behaviour change (Speake et al., 2016). Working with local organisations and potential end-users to guide the design of new physical activity interventions is recommended to increase project relevance and buy-in through working with people, not on people (Smith et al., 2023). The aim of the research, therefore, was to collaborate with Team GB, to harness the motivational power of the Olympic Games, and local organisations and end-users to create a novel, tailored physical activity intervention to encourage green exercise participation in local, accessible outdoor spaces in the East Riding of Yorkshire. The aim was to also collect data on the impact of engagement on measures of perceived health, wellbeing, and physical activity, and understand motivators and barriers to future re-engagement.A systematic review of academic and grey literature was undertaken to understand the impact of community-based outdoor physical activity interventions on quantitative and qualitative measures of health and wellbeing (Chapter 2). Qualitative feedback from authors and participants was thematically synthesised to understand successful and non-successful intervention design elements to support future intervention development. Key messages included the particular benefits of walking and multi-activity opportunities on measures of general health, mental wellbeing, and social wellbeing, with these projects recommended to be low-cost, in accessible spaces, varied and flexible, and offering social opportunities. These findings were discussed with local stakeholders, and it was decided to develop Team GB Family Activity Trails in Hull and Withernsea (Chapter 4).The activities included on the trail signposts and website pages were co-designed by conducting surveys with local adults (Chapter 5) and focus groups with local primary and secondary school children (Chapter 6). End-users wanted to see a variety of sport, physical activity, scavenger hunt, and nature activities included on the trails and both tangible and online prizes to encourage participation. The researcher used these recommendations to design and launch the Team GB Family Activity Trails.A cross-sectional questionnaire was implemented to collect feedback data from both adults and children after a single use of the trails (n = 214). The findings revealed high levels of enjoyment, re-engagement intention, and interest in recommending the trails (>80%). There was also evidence of short-term improvements in mood after engagement, and gender differences in activity preferences between male and female participants (Chapter 7).To assess changes in perceived health and wellbeing after multiple engagements in the Team GB Family Activity Trails, a group of adults and children engaged in a within-subjects repeated-measures pre-to-post experimental study (n = 44). Users took part in the trails three times over six weeks and completed questionnaires at the start and end of the six-week period, and immediately before and after each of the three walks. Significant improvements in measures of general and mental health were reported after each walk and when comparing scores at pre-and post-intervention, with female participants demonstrating a greater breadth of benefits (Chapter 8).The final study employed semi-structured follow-up interviews with participants involved in Chapters 7 and 8 (n = 23). The importance of offering varied and flexible activities, and the positive impact on mental and social wellbeing, were key findings strengthened throughout the thesis. The interviews also developed the idea of a reciprocal benefit of the project being endorsed by Team GB and identified evidence of people actively re-engaging and recommending the trails.Taken together, initial evidence on ‘Activity Trails’, endorsed by Team GB as a credible national organisation, demonstrates the project as a free, easily accessible, and fun mode of green exercise for eliciting positive outcomes of perceived general mental health, social wellbeing, and connection to local nature spaces in both adults and children. The project has scalability potential to other outdoor areas in England in the future.