Soon after we met, we started using the word ‘swellness’ spontaneously. It kept creeping into our chats, popping up in our texts, winding its way into WhatsApp. We decided it was our combined word for fitness and wellness. And it wouldn’t leave us.
Swellness became the summation of what we wanted for everybody - to find their path to swellness (fitness and wellness). Our health and well-being are precious, and fitness is part of the fuel that helps us be our best selves. Together, they enable us to explore all the world can offer in our time here.
We realised our path was to work together to help you find it. We have both dedicated much of our lives to finding it for ourselves. We have both had health struggles, discovered the power of meditation, read up on nutrition, tried many forms of fitness, and explored self-care techniques to help us unlock swellness in ourselves. So, together, it felt natural to try and figure out how to help people find theirs every day.
So, here is our first attempt at our six steps to swellness; they are our simple summary of everything we have learnt so far that has helped us find our swellness, and that continue to help us every day. We hope they help you to find yours, but we also know that everyone’s path to swellness will be as unique as they are. So we offer them as a hypothesis, because they’ve helped us, in the hope they might help you too.
Our biggest hope is that we can help you in some small way, but your swellness is yours to find - you might have three steps or you might write to us and tell us you have ten steps. Regardless, we would love to learn from you, to again help others.
You might also notice, these steps are neither exclusive, nor patented or complicated - there is no ‘system’ you can buy to support them - sure we sell tools and products that might help - but our steps to swellness are free and always will be, as nature intended.
So, here they are, summarised as our latest thinking, but likely to change and evolve as we grow and learn more. But, these six steps will likely form the foundation, as they help us feel, simply, swell.
1) Meditate - it’s free, it feels amazing, it only takes ten minutes a day to make a difference. Meditation has been cited to help so many elements of our health and mental and physical well-being. We’d love to help you discover why we love it.
2) Pure SWELL - we are made from 50 – 60% of it and it makes up 71% of our planet’s surface, so no wonder it feels so good to drink, be around and be in. We love it and it makes us feel good in every form. So, drink lots, play in it, wash in it, and explore cold showers (just try a few seconds after your usual warm shower and build up, no big drama on how…), swim wild, and take care of this precious stuff (we always water our plants and trees with our Swell Fit Bag water - small steps!).
3) Eat SWELL. Not too much, not too little, not too crazy. You know the drill. Eating right makes swell sense. But for us, if we are keeping up steps 1 and 2, somehow it’s easier to find a balanced diet and eat the right stuff. We are what we eat, food is our medicine… How many cliches do you want? :) But, we also know it’s not easy. Food is fun, food is love, food is joy and food can also too often fill the emptiness we feel inside, rather than our tummies.
We don’t have the resources yet to create the material we know we need to help you more here. But we can promise this is a topic that we will never grow tired of reading and learning about, so we will share more on this step as soon as we can, to help you. And we will find the right experts and partners to help us so we can help you more here.
4) Spend time in the wild. Where do we start on the whys here… there are so many reasons to stay and get wild. It’s our home, our outdoors and our earth to explore, and yet too often we find ourselves stuck in zoom doom all day and when we check our watches (or when I checked in my last job before Swell) we have done just 3k steps a day and not stepped outside.
So, stay wild, get wild more; be wild and do wild stuff (whatever that means for you - you know what feels good). For us, it means taking a daily walk to soak up that vitamin D and lumens, prioritising wild workouts - it just feels better to us, when we workout outdoors and there is research to suggest it’s better for everyone that we will share soon. And, of course, getting in some wild yoga, wild meditations, doing some tree hugging and getting bare foot in the forest. You know, the stuff that just makes you feel swell. Do that; do it more often until you feel swellness. Simple when you think about it, huh?
5) Get SWELL fit. Surprise! We believe in fitness :). But we don’t believe there is one way to it. Most days I fancy yoga, some days it’s a walk, some days a swim, other days it’s a workout. However you move, just do it enough to take care of your body and health.
6) Find your soul family. My what!? We can’t find swellness alone in our caves. We humans are social creatures and our wonderful world is best explored with those we love who just help us feel swell. So find them, hang out with them, eat with them, meditate with them, moan to them when your swellness is out of whack, try new stuff with them, hug them, hold them when it’s not working out and they just need to be with you in an extra-long one.
Find the ones that help you find your swellness, that bring that best kind of energy into your life. We don’t need a research link to explain to you why this is part of finding swellness. We all know the power of having support and being together. We just feel that sometimes life can disconnect us from how important this is, and how much we need it to feel the whole of our swellness.
So, find your soul family and have fun walking the path to swellness together. There will be many twists and turns and explorations and new starts. But swellness is always there for you; and sharing that with others feels swell to us.
We’d love to help you along the way and learn from how you find yours. Our swellbeings@swellfitness.co.uk are always here to answer your questions and hear your ideas.