Safe Exercise

The Safe Exercise Initiative - led by your Sports Officer (Rob Hegarty) in collaboration with UB Sport, Cool Runnings, the Green Heart Runners, the Women’s Fitness and Wellbeing society, the Community Wardens and your Welfare and Community Officer.

Your safety is always our priority and with more and more people exercising outside during lockdown/the tiered system, we want to make it safer for those getting involved. Especially considering how dark it gets during the winter months.

There are a number of ways in which we want to help:

Safety alarms

The Guild will be providing safety alarms which you can register your interest in using the form below. Initially we will only have a limited number to distribute, but if the demand is large enough, we will look into providing more alarms and also the provision of torches and reflective running bands.

Running routes

Producing numerous well-lit running routes at a range of distances that have some CCTV coverage along the way. Further to this, we'll also provide advice on areas to avoid, such as the canal in the dark. These will be posted on a Facebook group that you can register your interest in joining, using the form below.

Running Groups

It is often much safer to exercise in a pair or a group. The form below contains details which will enable us to sort suitable running group chats, based on numerous given preferences.

Currently, the Government guidelines only allow you to exercise with one other person outside (at a Covid safe distance), so we aim to group people with similar preferences together so you can go for runs with someone from your group. The guidelines will be constantly monitored, and we hope that people will be able to exercise together in larger numbers within the coming months.

If running groups are of interest to you, then we also recommend you look into joining the Cool Runnings Club (for students) or the Green Heart Runners (for staff).

Encouraging you to download the app ‘HollieGuard’

This app can be turned on when going for a run in the dark or if ever you feel you're walking or running somewhere which could be unsafe. The app works by allowing you to shake your phone in an emergency, which will trigger flashing lights and an alarm. It will also send an alert to your designated emergency contact with your exact location. On top of this, video and audio begins immediately, which is then sent to a cloud location.