@DodgyTickers - Exercise & Wellbeing
@Dodgy Tickers Exercise and Wellbeing Programme provides cardiac rehab & prevention exercise activities and additionally social activities and wellbeing support including positive mental health.
The programme is open to anyone living with heart disease or other health conditions such as Diabetes, Parkinson’s, etc, currently there are participants between the ages of 40 - 80 years old. The programme is also open to all, men & women, over the age of 50 irrespective of having any health condition.
The programme takes place at different venues across east London. Participants are encouraged to get involved as much (or as little) as they wish or feel comfortable with. Emphasis is on inclusion, support and having fun.
Activities include:
- Walking football
- 3-touch football
- Running football
- Social nights out
- Members only Whatsapp group
- Trips away in the UK and abroad
Recent press coverage:
Survivors Helping Tackle Heart Disease Together
@DodgyTickers Fitness is a unique programme in east London founded by heart disease survivor Farooq Mohammed. Challenged by his own diagnosis and discovering the scale of CVD (CardioVascular Disease) around the globe, he has combined his passion for sport and personal experience with heart disease to try and help others, living with the same or other chronic health conditions. Today, the programme helps survivors and heart patients of any age, including people in their late 70s, some who had never exercised before, to engage and more importantly, participate safely in physical activity. With several weekly exercise sessions now taking place every week, the programme continues to grow in strength, drawing attention and engagement from local stakeholders including the NHS, social prescribers, local authorities, the Mayor of London and charities such as CALM who work to improve mental health and well-being. All involved in areas linked directly, or indirectly, to tackling heart disease.
Today, the programme is meeting a critical need, helping survivors to deal with their own physical and mental health well-being needs beyond the initial 1-2 month period of post event rehab offered by the NHS, and that’s not all, the programme has widened its joining criteria to welcome anyone over the age of 50, irrespective of having a health condition, recognising the equal importance of prevention as much as rehab for CVD survivors.
Building resilience and confidence with individuals to aid overall well-being is hugely important to Farooq, and this is done in different ways. New members joining the programme are paired with a ‘buddy’ to feel welcomed and supported from the get go, additionally, every month the programme hosts a night out to one of the many restaurants across the city, a different one each time, providing an opportunity for participants to come together in a relaxed informal setting to talk, make new friends and share personal experiences. New friendships have flourished and in fact, the programme has created an internal community who are only too glad to assist and support each other helping from plumbing jobs to providing advice on a remortgage! The programme has also facilitated weekend trips away to Yorkshire for example to play a friendly, or a trip abroad travelling to Italy and touring the Amalfi Coast on scooters which have proved immensely popular, in fact, so much so that members eagerly await the next trip to be announced! In between opportunities to get together physically, there is also a thriving online WhatApp chat group to continue social contact and this has proved an invaluable support lifeline to those from time to time unable to attend sessions in person or in hospital for treatment. There is no compulsion, you get involved as little or as much as you want.
Coming from a corporate background, Farooq has worked as a freelance business consultant, trainer and executive coach since his own diagnosis in 2012, working and helping many clients and leadership teams here in the UK and abroad. With the @DodgyTickers programme, he has deployed his professional skills to positive effect in building a self-sustainable model without any external grant or funding. The programme is FREE to join, and operates as a subsidised, affordable, low cost pay as you go model with members only paying for each activity or exercise they participate in. But the self sustaining theme doesn’t stop there, the programme also has trained First Aiders as well as certified Mental Health First Aiders, who are all members of the programme themselves, so truly enabling the programme to provide support to peers from peers.
Recently, the @DodgyTickers have featured in the ‘Our Future Health’ campaign, the NHS’s biggest research undertaking since 1948. You can find out more about this campaign here: https://ourfuturehealth.org.uk/news/meet-the-dodgytickers-six-survivors…
If you would like to find out more about the @DodgyTickers programme, please see contact details below.
Contact:
Farooq Mohammed
Phone: 020 3442 2020
Email: F4RUC@icloud.com
Twitter: twitter.com/DodgyTickers
Facebook: DodgyTickers