JUST a few years ago, former management consultant Rosemary Pringle never imagined her working day would consist of chasing other adults around the park in the rain, dodging fluorescent foam balls and slipping and sliding across the turf, making a dive to tag another player. Nor that it would be so much fun.

But ever since she and friend Charlotte Roach ditched their high earning jobs in the City to set up Rabble, a new fun fitness company which disguises interval training as the sort of rough and tumble games we enjoyed playing as children, they haven’t looked back.

After being badly injured in a cycling training accident, which caused lasting damage, former Olympic hopeful Charlotte began to question her motivation to compete, which is why she came up with the idea of creating modern versions of old school games like British Bulldog and Fly the Flag, in order to improve fitness, as well as being enjoyable.

Living off their savings and for no salary for the first year, they took a huge gamble. But Rabble, which has expanded from London to Manchester and hopes to open in the North-East in the next year, now has more than 1,000 members, with numbers steadily increasing.

The Art of Healthy Living website recently listed Rabble as one of the five top international fitness trends for 2016 and it has been supported by Dame Kelly Holmes, who says the sense of play used in Rabble games is critical, something she herself uses in sessions with disadvantaged youngsters.

It was a huge leap of faith, says Rosemary who is, herself, the perfect example of Rabble’s core user. Within weeks, she knew the concept would work because not only was she getting fitter, she realised she had forgotten what it was like to enjoy herself so much. “Chasing and tagging, I felt free again, totally raw," she says. "I hadn’t felt that sort of exhilaration since I was a child. You are absolutely shattered, but keep running because someone is about to score a point or you are one point down and there are 30 seconds on the clock. I was exercising without realising.”

Rabble runs drop-in sessions with no joining fees: “It feels like being in a sports club, but without being committed every weekend and having to trek to all the way to Slough or somewhere to play hockey. And it is so sociable too, we can have a good game and go to the pub as friends afterwards.”

Looking back, Rosemary, who grew up in Ripon, North Yorkshire, says that when she finished for the day at the large international consultancy firm where she worked, one of her main priorities was to catch up on sleep. Hardly surprising, since she worked up to 70 hours a week, including extensive foreign travel, and sometimes didn’t return home until 1am. That didn’t leave much time for seeing friends and family. A keen athlete and hockey player, who was women’s sports captain at Ripon Grammar School and went on to run for her university, she soon found that even squeezing in an hour at the gym seemed like a chore.

When Charlotte - whom she met at Cambridge University, where they were both in the running club - told her about her idea for a fitness business which would adults together to enjoy old school games like British Bulldog and Fly the Flag, she initially dismissed it as ‘bonkers’. But, having fallen out of love with the gym herself, she soon began to realise that other young professionals working long hours in the City, like herself, might want to do it too. “I had always loved sport. At school I had a go at everything, even if I was terrible. And at university I trained two times a day, six days a week. I never had a problem getting myself to the gym or a training session outside in the pouring rain in winter.”

When she came to London, she expected she would continue to compete. “But I found I didn’t have time to train and, as soon as I stopped having a goal, I fell out of love with the gym. I couldn’t motivate myself to go any more," she says.

At 25 years old she found, for the first time in her life, she wasn’t exercising. “I had so many other commitments and it wasn’t fun. I thought, why spend time doing something you don’t enjoy?” Charlotte’s idea of playing games for exercise suddenly started to appeal: “She had been talking about it for a while. I didn’t believe in it to start with, but, as I went through my own process of going off the gym, I began to see her point. There are so many different ways to burn energy which are fun and sociable.”

At that point Rosemary had been working in Switzerland four days a week, not seeing friends and family: “I felt shattered and had no social life. I realised I desperately wanted to do something new and meet new people in London. I began to see why it was a great idea, a way of putting the fun back into my life.”

Inspired by gamification, the trend in education for turning difficult tasks into a game, Charlotte, a former construction manager, devised 20 fun games you need no experience to play but which improve fitness. While Charlotte took charge of the bigger picture, Rosemary came on board as the business mind behind Rabble. But when they finally gave up their well-paid jobs to start their social enterprise in February 2014, it was ‘absolutely terrifying’, says Rosemary: “Before, we had been earning City salaries, with good prospects. Now we had to work for free for the first year, living very frugally off our savings.”

Working from coffee shops and at their kitchen tables, she says: “There was so much work, creating a grass roots business with no financial backing. I remember my flatmate coming home and there were post-it notes stuck all over the place with names and ideas.” They started small, advertising classes on free websites at first: “We started running classes before we quit our jobs, just to see if it would work. And people did turn up,” she says.

Luckily, the business managed to cover its costs from the start and, with support from people like Dame Kelly Holmes, who used to be Charlotte’s mentor, it soon grew from strength to strength, operating from five London locations. Metro newspaper was soon calling it ‘one of the best ways to meet people in London’ and the Evening Standard described it as the "backlash against boring exercise".

“When we started running classes, sometimes there were just two people, now there are usually around 20 and up to 30,” says Rosemary. And Rabble’s corporate team building events for 70 people or more are also becoming increasingly popular.

Charlotte continues to develop new games, with themes including Hollywood movies and popular TV series, designed not just to improve weight loss, but also endurance and agility, with a mix of high-intensity interval training and speed games. They are now attracting people in their twenties through to their sixties, says Rosemary. “But they’re commonly young professionals, new to the city, looking to meet new people and get fit.

“They’re friendly, sociable people, not necessarily super sporty. Some people have thanked us for just getting them ‘off their bum’. It’s about happiness and confidence as well as fitness.”

Now employing nine people, Rabble successfully launched in Manchester in August 2015. “It grew much more quickly than London, because people have heard of us. It’s been amazing. We’re looking to expand to other cities, like York and Newcastle,” says Rosemary.

And she has further cause to celebrate. “I am so much fitter now. Charlotte and I started out going to every single session and my body was transformed," she says. "That’s what makes me believe in this business.”

n joinrabble.com