Mountain Bike Trail Therapy

We oversee the national strategy for mountain biking in Scotland which identified that mountain biking could work in a more proactive manner with our National Health Service.

We were not seeing a lot of activity in this area and were keen to progress a programme with research and evaluation built into it so we could study exactly how mountain biking could directly support good mental health.

We convened a meeting with partners in the area where we are based, at Glentress in the Scottish Borders. There we met an occupational therapist and mountain biker to progress an idea she had to provide a therapeutic approach within a non-clinical environment to promote the use of self-management skills to improve patients' physical and mental health.

Mountain biking was seen as the ideal activity to meet her client’s needs.

The project’s aim was to share the joys and obtainable challenges of mountain biking with folks who have an existing mental health diagnosis and to assess its effect on people’s overall mental health, both on the trail and in their everyday lives after the ride.

The goal was also to help the individuals involved grow in confidence, improve social interactions, establish skills of self-regulation and accelerate their road to well-being.

We were keen to help this programme to happen by delivering the weekly sessions. We wanted to understand if mountain biking aided people’s recovery from a period of mental ill health, how we as leaders could learn from the experience, and, using our role within mountain biking in Scotland, how we could take these learnings and spread them across the country.

We know that with an increasingly stretched National Health Service, third sector support will be essential going forward.

The NHS need a suite of programmes that it can tap into, programmes that have been evaluated and their efficacy demonstrated.

Trail Therapy is one such programme where a bespoke combination of mountain biking activity, led by professional mountain bike leaders and coaches supported by Occupational Therapists, Mental Health Nurses, Councillors and Green Health Partnerships is demonstrating effectiveness.

18 months in from our first allocation of funding, we are super pleased that we have secured funding to keep Trail Therapy going until March 2023.

We are continuing to source further funding to enable us to not only continue the programme into the next financial year, but to expand our reach.

We know the demand is out there, across all ages and demographics and we continue to receive requests from across the world; folk watching us and looking for help and advice on how to set up Trail Therapy in their region.

So where are we at just now?

• We have delivered Trail Therapy, using our unique FLOW technique across Dundee, Perth and Kinross and Lanarkshire supporting over 50 folk and delivering well over 800 sessions!

• We have trained 8 volunteers (and are just recruiting a few more) alongside 6 mental health professionals to be mountain bike leaders, coaches and first aiders (physical and mental health) and we are still expanding.

• We have partnered with Endura's Life Cycle Trust, HaVen, Feeling Strong, Comrie Croft, Dundee Cycle Hub, Green Health Partnerships, Alpine Bikes and the NHS to name but a few and we will continue to work with others to extend what we can do.

Funding is essential to enable the continuation of this work so we are greatly appreciative to NatureScot, Trek, Scottish Cycling, Dundee Volunteer and Voluntary Action and Perth and Kinross Voluntary Action Service - we couldn't have done it without you!

We want this programme to be rolled out across Scotland and the rest of the UK.

It links into national (Scottish) agendas such as NatureScot’s Our Natural Health Service initiative, responding directly to the mental health crisis we are facing and lays the foundations for a structured, rigorously evaluated, nature-based solution to support our health service going forward.

It is vital that any future projects are subject to a robust evaluation because these are essential in demonstrating how structured interventions such as this deliver real health outcomes.

Only with robust evaluation can we demonstrate success not only for funders but equally importantly, for those within healthcare settings looking to alternative ways to manage the increasing mental health care pressures.