Lehlomela plants a biokinetics seed in the hearts of black women

Lebogang Lehlomela has built a lucrative business for herself

Although LEBOGANG LEHLOMELA bemoans the fact that her high schools lacked certain sports amenities like swimming and tennis, she made it to become a sport science graduate and a biokinetic, a rare profession and feat for many black people in South Africa at the moment. Her ambition now, apart from making her practice the best in the country, is to pilot the career to black women. She tells Thembi Masser about her mother’s wish that she becomes an engineer and Virgin Active.   

  

Lebogang, 27, obtained her degree - sport science - at the Tshwane University of Technology (TUT). Sport science was not her first love, she reveals, but once she found herself on the lawns of TUT she, out of the blue, registered for the course. Even she chose to go to TUT just because they were the first to respond to her application to be their student. So it was while in her first year as a student the bug to be a biokenitist clawed its hooks in her. She was intrigued by her physiology lecturer’s exotic profession, biokinetics.

“I asked more questions about this biokinetics,” she enthuses. “I was intrigued, fascinated.  The more I asked, the more I fell in love with it.”  But she went on to finish her sport science degree.

She explains what entails the sport science course:  Sports science is about conditioning players and there are there are two components, fitness and health. In fitness, she says, it is about flexibility, agility, strength, body composition and reaction time. The health component encompasses cardio vascular fitness and body composition.

It was after completing her sport science degree that she enrolled to do a year of biokinetics study. What irks her even now was that out of a total of 12 attendees there were only 3 black students.Biokinetics is more about prevention and treatment of injuries as well as chronic deceases. For complete healing biokinetists prescribe exercising for chronic diseases unlike medical doctors who prescribe medication for diseases.   

“In my second year of study I joined Virgin Active as a life style consultant to augment both my sport knowledge and my purse.’

To date she has been in practice for 6 months as the owner of Lehlomela Bio. “But before this I worked at Greenstone Life style for a while to get my mojo on.”

Now that she is on her own her goal is to more Africans at public clinics practicing as biokinetics. “Public clinics are not as well endowed with a complete set of health personnel as your private health care, so it is my quest to see more Africans studying biokinetics and to teach the public about the wonders of biokinetics.” This is important, she says, because many people rely on medication most of the time instead of throwing exercise into the mix after injury or a diseases attack.   

Lebogang started her schooling at the ST John’s primary school in Actonville, Benoni and then proceeded to the nearby William Hills High schools. Her choice of subjects at school, unknown to her then, pointed the way to her future career. She liked biology (although she loathed the plant part of it) and maths the most above English, Afrikaans, physical science and computer studies.   

“At the time I did not know what I was going to do after grade 12. My teachers too did not help much. Again, at that time there was no career guidance classes at the school.” But her mom was interested in her future. ‘She insisted that her daughter must be an engineer.”

Lebogang was a shy, quiet learner. “I was a studious learner, but I could have done better if there were swimming and tennis facilities at high school. You know. The best facilities are always at private schools, which most of us do not afford.”  

Lebogang with her class at the Mokoka library in Vergenoeg, Daveyton, Benoni