Welcome to GoodGym to all those lovely first timers who came yesterday to the Hounslow starter session, and to those more familiar faces that lent a hand cleaning up the shoreline! At GoodGym we add purpose to our work out, and 13 of us made a real difference by filling several bags full of plastic and other litter before smashing a circuits based workout.

As we met at Kew Bridge for our starter session, the conditions were perfect, with blue skies and a low tide. It was great to meet Emma, Lexy, Gemma, Skye and Katherine for their first GoodGym session . It's the best way to use your run to do good, support the local community, get to other people who live in the area, and have a good time while getting your workout in.

We do this in four main ways:

• Group runs which happen every Wednesday evening. You can find all the details of the next run here. Hope to see you then!

• Missions - one off runs to an elderly and isolated person's house to help out with a job they can't manage themselves. We move in hospital beds, mow lawns, change lightbulbs, and put up furniture. Every job makes the life of the person you're helping so much better! Check out the upcoming missions here to see what's going on and get yourself DBS checked.

• Coach runs. This is a brilliant way to combat loneliness in the elderly. We pair you up with an older person who may not see anybody else from day to day. You visit them weekly for a chat - not only is it a wonderful thing to do for somebody who is lonely, but you get an incentive to head out there for your run and you could form a pretty great friendship in the process. That's why they're called your coach!

• Finally we have community mission, where a group meets up to do a task to support a local community organisation. For these you don't need to be DBS checked, everybody is welcome, and you don't even have to run there (although it adds to the fun if you do!). You can see all the community missions happening here including one in Hounslow happening tonight!

After a quick chat about all things GoodGym, we headed down to the slipway by Kew Bridge to quick it a good clean up. Armed with litter pickers and bin bags we got to work picking up the plastic bottles, earbuds, bottle caps and other nasties that are polluting our waterways. We got lots of friendly support from locals passing by who thanked us for our efforts, and asked if they could join in next time! Our resident horticulturalist Luis was also on hand to reliably inform us that some strange round objects were indeed natural and could be left on the shoreline. Any further botany queries should be addressed to him care of Kew Gardens. After 45 minutes of hard work, we had amassed a huge amount of rubbish, so we downed tools and headed over to a green space to do the fitness part of the session.

Diving up into pairs, with one pair acting us our timer by doing 50 jumping jacks, we worked through several stations featuring lunges, squats, step ups and one legged squats. We then moved on to an arms blast which saw us do three sets of tricep dips and press ups, before finishing with a plank.

We stretched it all out in the sunshine after a job well done - thanks for all your efforts everybody, hope to see you all again soon!