UniSA Run Free: A Facebook Running Program for healthy Australian adults

UniSA Run Free is an eight week beginners running program that has been created in collaboration with experts in the field, Dr Grant Tomkinsion and professor Kevin Norton, to ensure that the program progresses safely and in an achievable and realistic manner for beginner runners. The running program and the Facebook group is being monitored by an Occupational Therapy honours student, who is being supervised by two senior Occupational Therapists and a senior Physiotherapist. The running program itself, consists of three sessions per week, where each session includes a 5 min walk warm up and cool down. The three sessions for each of the 8 weeks is described below Week 1: 5 sets of run 1 minute, walk 1 minute; 6 sets of run 1 minute walk 1 minute; 5 sets of run 90 seconds and walk 90 seconds Week 2: 6 sets of run 90 seconds and walk 90 seconds; 5 sets of run 2 minutes and walk 2 minutes; 3 sets of run 3 minutes and walk 3 minutes Week 3: 6 sets of run 2 minutes and walk 2 minutes; 6 sets of run 2 minutes and walk 1 minute, 6 sets of run 3 minutes and walk 90 seconds Week 4: 5 sets of run 4 minutes and walk 2 minutes; 7 sets of run 3 minutes and walk 1 minute; Run 12 minutes continuously Week 5: 6 sets of run 4 minutes and walk 2 minutes; 10 sets of run 3 minutes and walk 1 minute; 4 sets of run 6 minutes and walk 2 minutes Week 6: Run 15 minutes continuously; 3 sets of run 8 minutes and walk 3 minutes; Run 18 minutes continuously Week 7: 5 sets of run 6 minutes and walk 2 minutes; Run 22 minutes continuously; 3 sets of run 10 minutes and walk 2 minutes Week 8: Run 26 minutes continuously; Run 16 minutes and walk 2 minutes, run 16 minutes; Run 30 minutes continuously The running program is designed to begin gently and gradually increases in intensity as the session’s progress and as the participants improve. The end goal of the running program is for the participants to run continuously for thirty minutes, which equates to approximately five kilometres. A fridge magnet with the running program on it will also be sent out to participants, so that they can tick off sessions once they have completed them. At the end of the intervention, participants will take a photo of their completed fridge magnet and send it back to researchers through email. As well as the running program, the intervention group will have access to a variety of different motivational posts through the private Facebook group to keep them engaged. Previous research has identified that the most engaging type of Facebook post is an opinion poll, followed by posts requesting participants to share helpful tips related to their intervention, for example healthy eating tips (Hales et al. 2014, p. 355). Posts that include links to related materials and posts that contain humorous content have also been shown to increase engagement and interactivity (Luarn et al. 2015, p. 508). In this study, a different type of motivational post will be posted to the intervention group each day over the eight week intervention period. The post type and its content will be varied from day to day to increase participants engagement and motivate them to continue participating in the program. These posts will also encourage social support and interaction amongst the participants, which will further increase their engagement with the program. An electronic log of Facebook posts and interaction will be kept to monitor engagement with the intervention