November 16, 2016

Wanna Be a Be Well Barnsley Record Breaker?

Be Well Team Leader Shelly Wareing talks us through just what goes into organising a world record attempt

Walt Disney said “Around here we don’t look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we’re curious… and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths” It’s precisely this curiosity and search for something innovative, which lead us to our attempt to break the wold record for ‘Largest Chair Based Exercise Class’ on August 14th 2016 (the beauty of Chair Based Exercise being that anyone can take part, no matter what their ability).

It’s funny how things come about. I was in a weight loss group and someone mentioned chair based exercise and for some reason my thoughts turned to the Guinness World Records. Curiosity got the better of me and I wondered if there was a current record for anything to do with chair based exercise. The current record resided in Indiana, USA with 431 participants. The idea of holding the record attempt was to bring the community together and raise Be Well Barnsley’s profile.

I felt it would be advantageous to hold it at a venue where a lot of people would already be that we could tag along with. The local park holds a gala every year and it’s very well attended. With a venue secured it was on to the logistics… I don’t know if you have ever applied for a world record but it’s a very long and thorough process! It takes quite a while for the strict guidelines to come through and when they arrived they brought a few surprises with them.

Firstly, the record had been broken between the time of application and the time of the guidelines arriving. The Chinese Women’s Institute beat us in July with 731 participants which raised the bar for us somewhat. The guidelines also stated that all the chairs had to be identical, which put a stop to our plan of asking for donated chairs from the community.

However, Be Well Barnsley likes a challenge so we set about sourcing 800-1000 chairs. After some begging and borrowing and being unable to find any free chairs, we finally agreed a deal with a chair hire company called Thorns. I then had to find a place to store the chairs over the weekend and arrange delivery. Myself and Gareth Roberts approached and secured funds from area Councillors to assist with costs… so we had our venue, our chairs, our instructor and staff to help. All we needed now was people willing to sit on chairs and do a spot of exercise.

We had a frantic month of promotion prior to the big day. The poster was a Yorkshire twist on the old Uncle Sam ‘your country needs you’ but we had a lady in rollers saying ‘your town needs you’. We were contacted by the local paper, councillors, celebs and radio and gave interviews to promote the event.

We had great weather on the Sunday and we arrived at 8am to set up 800 chairs (that were being stored up the hill on palettes with 150 chairs per palette!). We could not have done it without the staff that gave their Sunday. Rob West, Julie Sharman, Bev Buxton, James Ball, Louise Exley, Darren Rowe, Claire Gray and Lesley Dixon were just amazing! It was a long day with lots of heavy lifting but they all pulled together and made the whole thing possible. After we set the chairs out we set about recruiting people to take part. The volunteers that came to help as stewards did amazingly well at approaching people and asking them to take part. Susie, Gemma, Angie, Vicky, Jean and Margaret had big smiles all day long and thoroughly enjoyed themselves.

The attempt went well, people that took part loved it and really enjoyed Susie’s eclectic mix of golden oldie tracks. Unfortunately we didn’t break the record, but we did have 538 people take part with big smiles and lots of laughter. The feedback on social media and local news has been fantastic with people saying they will be back next year to try again – so watch this space!