Why we exist

The people are the point.

Why we are building Shaping Up, by Juan and Andrew.

There is a version of getting fit that most of us have tried. You download the app, you buy the shoes, you go out alone, and for two weeks it works. Then one cold Tuesday you skip a session, the app sends you a guilt-trip notification about your streak, and the whole thing quietly dies. Not because you are lazy. Because doing hard things alone, indefinitely, is miserable, and no amount of gamification fixes miserable.

We think the fitness industry got the problem backwards. It treats exercise as the goal and other people as a distraction. Everything we have read, and everything we have lived, says it is the other way round. The people are the point. Movement is how you spend time with them.

Loneliness is not a soft problem

In England, government figures show around seven per cent of adults feel lonely often or always. That is millions of people, and the detail is worse than the headline: the loneliest group is not the elderly but adults under 25, and disabled adults report chronic loneliness at more than four times the rate of non-disabled adults. The World Health Organization now treats social disconnection as a global health concern, and it is right to.

Because loneliness is not just sad. It is physically dangerous. The research programme led by Professor Julianne Holt-Lunstad, pooling hundreds of studies and millions of participants, found that people with strong social relationships are around fifty per cent more likely to survive over a given period than people without them. The often-quoted comparison from that work is that sustained isolation carries a health risk of a similar magnitude to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. We spend enormous effort telling people to quit smoking and eat better. We spend almost nothing helping them belong somewhere.

What the longest-lived places have in common

The communities where people routinely live into their nineties, the Sardinian hill towns and Greek islands of the so-called Blue Zones, were not doing high-intensity interval training. What they had, and what researchers keep finding when they study them, is daily, unavoidable, low-key social contact woven into physical life: walking to see a neighbour, gardening, carrying things, eating together, belonging to something. Movement and connection were never separate activities. That is the Mediterranean insight, and you do not need to move to Sardinia to apply it. You need a reason to walk somewhere, and someone expecting you.

The outdoors is a dose, and it is small

The nature side of this is now properly evidenced too. A University of Exeter study of nearly twenty thousand people, published in Scientific Reports, found that spending at least two hours a week in nature was associated with significantly better self-reported health and wellbeing. Two hours. Not marathons, not mountains. And it counted the same whether people took it in one walk or several short visits, and it held for older adults and people with long-term health conditions. The Japanese practice of shinrin-yoku, forest bathing, points the same way: time among trees measurably lowers stress. Greenery is not decoration. It is treatment, and in a borough like Greenwich it is free and five minutes away.

Put the three together

Each of these things alone is good for you. Exercise is good for you. Time outdoors is good for you. Social connection is good for you. But alone, each one is fragile. Exercise without people collapses into the abandoned app. Parks without company can be the loneliest places in London. And connection without a shared activity is hard to start, because almost nobody can walk up to a stranger and say "shall we be friends?"

Put them together and each one carries the others. The group gets you out the door on the cold Tuesday. The walk gives the conversation somewhere to go. The park does its quiet work on everyone. You come back next week not because an app threatened your streak but because Margaret will be there, and she was funny last time. Without the connection, exercise is lonely in itself, and lonely habits do not last. With it, you are not really exercising at all. You are seeing your people, and movement is just how it happens.

That is why Shaping Up sessions are built the way they are. Every pace is welcome and the group sets it. There are no leaderboards, no streaks and no shame about the week you missed. Every session tells you exactly what to expect: a named host, a public meeting place, what to bring. The barriers that keep inactive people inactive are rarely about fitness. They are cost, intimidation and not knowing what you are walking into. So free sessions are always free, and nothing about the design is there to make anyone feel behind.

Who we are

We are two friends building this from Greenwich. Andrew builds the systems; Juan designs the experience. Between us we have spent years in technology watching very clever people optimise apps for engagement, and we wanted to use the same craft on something that deserves it: getting people outside, together, supported, at whatever level they are at today.

We are not selling a transformation. We do not think you need transforming. We think you need a walk, some air, and people who notice when you are not there. We are structuring the whole thing as a community venture because the point is the community, and we would rather grow slowly and honestly than quickly and hollow.

Sources: the Community Life Survey 2024/25 on loneliness (GOV.UK); Holt-Lunstad et al., Social Relationships and Mortality Risk, PLOS Medicine; White et al., Spending at least 120 minutes a week in nature is associated with good health and wellbeing, Scientific Reports, 2019.