On Saturday, 22 August 2026, Maddog Health & Wellness joined Maddog Performance Institute to co-host a Women's Month event in Ballito built around a simple idea: personal safety and personal wellness belong in the same conversation.
Twenty-five women spent the day learning to read a room before they need to, respond to an emergency, and — just as importantly — give their bodies a proper reset afterwards. We promised a wellness package alongside the training in our lead-up piece for the day. Here's how it actually played out.
A Day Built Around Whole-Person Wellness
It would have been easy to run this as a straightforward self-defence class and call it a day. We wanted something broader — a day that treated safety, awareness and recovery as three parts of the same picture, not separate topics.
That meant structuring the day around our clinical team, not just our combat coaching, and sending every woman home with something she could actually use afterwards: a voucher for a proper, supervised recovery session rather than a goodie bag on the way out the door.
Situational Awareness and First Aid with Amanda Wren Kobus
The clinical core of the day was led by Amanda Wren Kobus, Maddog's in-house Registered Nurse and Strength & Conditioning Coach — also a Proteas-selected Master 1 powerlifting athlete, KZNPLF Master 1 record holder, and Director of the KwaZulu-Natal Powerlifting Association.
Her session covered situational awareness — not a fear-based framing, but a practical one: paying attention to your surroundings, recognising when something feels out of place, knowing where your exits are, and thinking through your options before you're under pressure to use them.
From there, the group moved into practical first-aid concepts: what to do in the first few minutes of an emergency, before professional help arrives, and how to stay useful rather than frozen when it matters.
Awareness and recovery aren't separate skills — they're both about knowing your own baseline well enough to notice when something's off.
The Wellness Package: Vouchers for an InBody Scan and Recovery Session
Every participant went home with two vouchers: a complimentary InBody body composition scan — a clinical-grade baseline reading most of them had never had done before — and a full contrast therapy recovery session in our infrared sauna and cold plunge, both redeemable at Maddog Health & Wellness whenever suited them.
That was a deliberate choice. A single day of training is over quickly; a voucher gives every woman a reason to come back on her own time, get a real reading on her body composition, and follow it with a guided recovery session — rather than the day's wellness component ending the moment the workshop did.
It's a small thing on paper — a scan, a sauna, an ice bath — but it turns a one-off event into an open door back into the space, on each woman's own schedule.
Self-Defence, Led by Amanda "Maddog" Lino
The physical self-defence component — creating distance, responding to grabs, basic scenario work — was led by Amanda "Maddog" Lino, 2× EFC World Champion and founder of Maddog Performance Institute. It was practical, not fight-focused, and it's the half of the day we'll let our sister site tell properly: read the full self-defence recap on Maddog Performance Institute for how that part of the day went.
Thank You to Our Sponsors
None of this happens without support from the local businesses who backed the day: Concha Bakery & Café, Mozambik Restaurant, Summa and Dallmayr. Concha and Mozambik also fed the room, turning a training day into something the women stayed and talked through afterwards.
Corporate Wellness Days in Ballito
The response to this event confirmed something we already believed: a wellness day works better as an experience than a lecture. Off the back of it, Maddog Health & Wellness is open to building corporate wellness days for companies, schools and organisations around Ballito — combining any of the following:
- InBody body composition assessments for the team
- Guided contrast therapy (infrared sauna & cold plunge) recovery sessions
- Situational awareness and personal safety briefings
- Basic workplace first-aid education
- IV nutrient therapy for energy and recovery
- Complementary self-defence fundamentals via Maddog Performance Institute
A wellness day can be built around your team's size and goals rather than a fixed package — whether that's a genuine employee wellness benefit, a different kind of team day, or both.
Interested in a Corporate Wellness Day?
If your company, school or organisation would like to discuss a wellness day, recovery session or safety briefing in Ballito, get in touch with the Maddog Health & Wellness team. 22 Sandra Road, Balvista Centre, Ballito, KZN.