Corporate Fitness and Active Aging

The current healthcare model in this country is scary.

It’s scary from a cost standpoint, to be sure. We spend more than $2 trillion annually on healthcare, and according to the American Medical Association, 75 percent of U.S. medical care dollars are spent on preventable illnesses like cardiovascular disease and diabetes. U.S. healthcare can be scary from a user standpoint, too.

A Frightening ER Adventure

I recently had an experience with strep throat while I was out of town. Unfortunately, my best Jedi mind tricks couldn’t beat his bug, so one raging fever and a wicked sore throat later, I found myself at the hotel lobby at 11:30 p.m. asking for help finding an emergency room.

The ER waiting room was an adventure in itself. After having to weave through a maze of men who appeared to be “sleeping it off,” I noticed that the waiting room smelled like urine. One of the would-be patients was vomiting in the most gut-wrenching way possible every two or three minutes. And there was this weird guy sitting in front of me who wasn’t wearing a shirt, had a gaping wound on his forehead, and (of  course) he felt it was acceptable to take off his shoes and socks to lay down on the lounge chair.  In a creepy (but I think well-meaning paternal) way, he repeately asked me, “Honey, are you OK?”

There’s nothing like a scary ER waiting room in a strange town to make you think twice about just how sick you really are!

Can Worksite Wellness Be the Place to Start?

Forgive me this sweeping generalization, but I think promoting better health really is the answer to this country’s scary sick-care model. If we can keep more people well, it will take some of the burden off of our overworked system (and hopefully help keep our emergency rooms from looking like something out of a horror film).

Worksites really do have a captive audience to target for worksite health promotion. Unfortunately, it seems that building a healthier workforce is getting scary, too. There are legal landmines to navigate, value-based benefits design to decode, communication strategies to build, and leadership to get on board. And if that isn’t a scary enough to-do list, many worksites are embarking on these healthier strategies with an army of one (or sometimes half of one) person.

“It’s scary” isn’t a reason to not get to work incentivizing better health in your workforce (it’s never wrong to do the right thing), but it certainly has stalled the best-laid plans.

What is your worksite doing to bravely improve employee health?

With money being tight in just about every organization these days, companies are looking to cut costs any way they can. At first glance, adding corporate health and wellness programs doesn’t seem like a very cost-effective move, especially if you're looking at building a corporate fitness center complete with an onsite fitness center. Upon closer examination, though, it’s clear that the benefits of worksite health promotion programs far outweigh the initial start-up costs of implementing them.

A recent study at the University of Michigan showed just how much a company can save over the long term by focusing on worksite wellness. The corporate wellness program of a large utility company was studied over a period of 9 years. The cost over that time period was rather large at $7.3 million, but it was found that the same “expensive” program saved the company $12.1 million over the long haul, for an overall savings of $4.8 million.

This study is believed to have found the true cost of implementing worksite health promotion programs because both the direct and indirect costs were measured. It may be a tough decision for the leaders of an organization to make because of the initial and ongoing costs of offering corporate wellness programs, such as staffing corporate fitness centers, but there seems to be a high return on the investment.

We all know the benefits of regular exercise and seeking to live a healthier life. Those who strive to live in this manner are a welcome relief to many employers. For those who need a little extra motivation, though (or even for those who don’t but like the convenience of onsite wellness opportunities), investigating how your company might be able to move forward with a corporate wellness program is a win-win situation.

Your employees are your most valuable asset. What are you doing to help invest in and protect them and thus protect your company's bottom line?

With our busy lifestyles, running to the pharmacy is just that: racing in and out as quickly as possible. Is this placing employee health in danger? Well, it could be. It's ultimately up to each of us to filter what substances go into our bodies.

Check Your Medicine

Even before paying for the medication, you should check the name, medication, and dose to ensure that the prescription has been correctly filled and belongs to you. Pharmacies require personal information such as name, date of birth, Social Security number (for insurance), or driver’s license number to guarantee that the medication is dispensed to the right individual. But it doesn't hurt to check.

Prescription Questions

Be aware of what you are putting into your system. Ask questions. The pharmacist is there not only to fill prescriptions, but also to answer questions. Know the answers to these questions before taking the medication:

• What is the name of the medicine?
• What is it supposed to do?
• How and when do I take it and for how long?
• What do I do if I forget to take the medicine?
• Are there any side effects?
• What should I do if I experience any side effects?
• Is there an information sheet about this medication?
• Are there any interactions with other drugs you are taking? (Check here to find out.)

Next time you head to the pharmacy to pick up a prescription, don’t rush. Take the time to check the prescription and ask questions for your own safety.

This much-debated topic has gone round and round in the medical and fitness community. Is it possible to be overweight and still be healthy?

On one side of the coin, researchers speculate that if an overweight or obese person has normal blood pressure, cholesterol, and glucose levels, there is no reason to push weight loss. On the other side, a study published by Circulation online in 2009 concluded that overweight (body mass of greater than 25) individuals with no abnormalities of blood pressure, cholesterol, or glucose have a 50 percent increased risk of developing heart disease compared to those of normal weight (body mass of less than 25). Beyond being bad for your heart, increased weight increases the risk of cancer and type 2 diabetes.

Regardless of what side of the debate you fall on, one thing is unanimous: Fitness is key and pounds matter less than type of body fat. That is where a worksite wellness program and corporate fitness staff can come into play to help you identify and reduce your dangerous fat.

Recently there has been a push to look beyond the standard BMI (body mass index) measurement and into true body composition testing. Skinfold testing, BOD POD, and underwater weighing are just a few of the tests available to determine the true percentage of body fat.

BMI does serve a purpose, but it also has its shortcomings. For example, check out the Shapely Prose blog by Kate Harding. She runs a “BMI Project,” a series of photos of individuals of different sizes with their BMI levels. It’s a glaring example of how skewed the BMI measurement can be at times. 

The fact is that being overweight or obese is not necessarily good for you, but more importantly being overfat is the largest concern. So eat a balanced diet, get plenty of exercise, and take care of yourself. Regardless of the debate, you have only one body, so take care of it!

Perform a search for components of an employee health and wellness program and you’ll find that smoking cessation makes its way into nearly all wellness programs. Tobacco-free employees have fewer health risks and cost their employers less than their tobacco-using counterparts do.

The Staggering Cost of Employee Tobacco Use

If you’re like me, you know that tobacco users must cost a company more money. But I didn’t realize how staggering the cost actually is. According to the CDC, tobacco users cost their employers nearly $3,500 per person each year in medical costs and lost productivity. If you figure that approximately one in four employees uses tobacco, the approximate cost per year for a 2,000-employee site is nearly $1.75 million!

Approaches to Encouraging Tobacco Cessation

Companies take two different approaches to tobacco cessation: incentives and penalties. My company's wellness incentive programs, for example, put a lot of focus on rewarding employees for their efforts to quit tobacco. With benefits ranging from reimbursement for medication to free counseling, becoming tobacco free is a priority. They even offer employees an extra cash bonus in their flex account for being or striving to be tobacco free.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, other companies impose penalties on tobacco users. In a recent survey of major U.S. companies, almost 50 percent of companies surveyed showed interest in penalizing their employees for not complying with all aspects of their wellness programs. In these companies, employees could face higher insurance premiums or increased deductibles. Some companies may even refuse to hire tobacco users.

In my opinion, the best way to keep employees on track for healthy behaviors is staffing a corporate fitness center with highly trained experts familiar with the company’s wellness programs. Onsite fitness center management provides the tools and resources that both employers and employees need to reach the goal of becoming tobacco free.  

So which approach is more effective toward the goal of having a tobacco-free workplace? Share your thoughts in the comments section.

Ever wish that your workplace was a little more relaxed and lighthearted? When working in a larger corporation many employees spend several hours of their day seated around a table discussing ideas, brainstorming, and solving problems.

I wonder what would happen if these sit-down meetings were transformed into moving meetings, on a ConferenceBike. These bikes seat seven people, allowing six participants to pedal as one person steers. It’s like turning a corporate meeting into corporate fitness!

Now I will admit they are a little funny looking and the price is a little steep for just a unique meeting place and a way to increase employee health. But it may have the potential to shorten meeting times, increase workplace productivity, improve employee morale, and develop a new type of worksite fitness.

Even if you know your company won’t buy into this moving meeting idea, just take a look at the ConferenceBike website for a stress-relieving laugh or a way to get your creative juices flowing. It worked for me!   

The other day one of my wellness center members approached me about my advice regarding vitamins and supplements. She had been feeling extremely tired and fatigued while at work and wanted to know if there was something she could be taking to combat her exhaustion. I was happy to see that she was increasing her activity in hopes of boosting her energy, but she said she was still feeling tired even after a 15-minute walk on the treadmill.

Supplements Can Fill In Your Employee's Nutritional Gaps

Vitamin and mineral supplements are a great backup plan for when our diets may be lacking in all the recommended fruits and vegetables we need. If you’re like me, this is pretty frequent. Although they are not necessary, it is nice to be able to fill in the nutritional gaps in our day-to-day diet choices with a supplement. This is especially true if you are on a diet that eliminates an entire food group or you are a vegetarian.

Encourage Employees to Speak to a Professional When Taking Supplements

It is best to speak to your doctor or a registered dietician when considering supplements so he or she can tell you which supplements are best. Additionally, if you are already taking a daily supplement, you should notify you doctor or pharmacist because some can interfere with your medications.

Supplements Aren't Always the Answer

Sometimes exhaustion can be caused by something as simple as eating too few calories or too much sugar. After a few questions with my member, we discovered that she was drinking almost no water (or any other liquid, for that matter). I encouraged her to keep a regular sleep/wake cycle, to continue exercising and I recommended that she increase her water intake.

Follow up with this member found her feeling much better! I was thrilled. She said her exercise routine is getting easier and she has drastically increased her H₂0.

A Health Professional Could Benefit Your Company

Many people suffer from fatique and exhaustion. Your company could benefit from offering employees the resources of a degreed exercise specialist or registered dietician as part of its employee health benefits. An exercise professional can assess your employees needs and, if necessary, refer them to a registered dietician who can not only assess one’s diet and make recommendations for improvement, he or she can suggest appropriate supplements if necessary.

If you’re skeptical like me, you may have questioned some of the weight-loss methods you’ve seen in the media. After all, any diet that requires you to substitute steak for fruit salad is sure to be a hit, but how healthy can that really be?

Amidst all the confusion a simple question remains: When looking to lose weight, what matters more? What you eat, or how much you eat? Here are some thoughts to share with overweight employees looking to make a change.

Tell Employees to Burn More Calories Than They Consume

Dr. David Katz, director of the Yale Griffin Prevention Research Center, seems to offer a simple answer. Dr. Katz points out that “The fundamental truth is that energy balance, calories in versus calories used, determines weight.” Put even more simply, the only way to lose weight is to burn off more calories than you consume. There’s really no mystery about calorie balance.

But it’s not quite that easy. How do you know if you should cut out carbs, pump up the protein, or follow any one of the many other suggestions out there along with eating less?

Nutritionist Mark Haub, an associate professor of nutrition at Kansas State University, answered these very questions with a unique experiment. For one month he ate a high-fat, high-sugar, low-nutrient diet consisting of Twinkies, Nutter Butters, canned or frozen vegetables, a protein supplement, steak, and milk averaging 1,800 calories per day. Believe it or not, he lost weight--15 pounds in the one-month experiment.

Tell Employees to Eat Less but Also Eat Healthy

So how much you eat has more bearing than what you eat--unless you actually want to lose weight in a healthy way.

The major problem with any diet is that you go on it, but eventually must come off of it. So unless you plan to maintain a diet the rest of your life, the odds are you will regain the weight you lost once you resume your normal eating habits.

The long and the short of it? Eat just enough of foods that are good for you and get on with the rest of your day!

In my last post, I explained that functional capacity is exercising in a way that improves the ability to perform activities of daily living. In this post I look at how this concept is being used in senior fitness classes and corporate fitness programs--in place of more traditional but less efficient training.

Senior Fitness Management Now Emphasizing Functional Training

One arena that has begun to understand this dilemma and has sought to eliminate it is senior fitness management. Some of the problems affecting older adults are poor balance, loss of strength, and a decrease in flexibility. As a fitness professional who frequently teaches senior fitness classes at retirement home fitness centers, I’ve noticed a trend in moving away from the typical chair exercise class, which was the norm years ago, to more functional training (training the body in the way in which it typically works).

Entire classes are now designed with the goal of improving balance. Many movements designed to improve strength are now done out of a chair and on the feet because this is how we typically function in everyday life. Along with this, retirement community fitness center management heavily pursues improving residents' flexibility. Since balance, strength while on the feet, and flexibility are all major needs of older adults, fitness professionals have made a move to more directly train in ways that improve these aspects specifically. This move is a perfect example of training to improve functional capacity.

Improving Employee Health Through Functional Training

Functional capacity can also be a synonym for aerobic health or power. Aerobic health or functional capacity is often the main measure used to determine one’s overall health. Numerous diseases that afflict many Americans today can be prevented or even reversed through improving aerobic health.

Many businesses have caught on to this and are pushing to improve their employees' physical health through exercise. This leads to less employee absenteeism, less fatigue on the job, and more productive employees. Since a company’s employees are one of its most valuable assets, many organizations have developed corporate wellness programs to help protect this asset. Because this can improve an employer’s bottom line, many companies are going one step further and building corporate fitness centers for their employees to utilize.

Through group fitness classes at these centers, personal training with staff, or even simply working out on their own, employees are improving the strength and endurance needed for their job as well as their aerobic health, leading to a lower risk of disease and less time lost from work. It is easy to see how this increase in functional capacity benefits both the employee and the employer over the long haul, despite the initial cost of building such centers.

Next: How everyday people can adjust their workouts to improve functional capacity.

If you don't exercise on a regular basis, a hot and humid summer day is not the time to start. Don’t get me wrong; I think you should start exercising as soon as you have the motivation. But maybe you should do it inside if it’s extremely humid outside. Exercising in the humidity intensifies everything and can also be dangerous.

Humidity's Effects on Your Body

You need to be careful because if your body is not used to exercise, the humidity can put you at risk for heat exhaustion and heat stroke. Your body produces heat during exercise which, combined with the heat outside, can inable your body to cool itself down.

I have experienced humidity first hand living in Indiana all my life. I run outside a lot. Just when I think I’m improving with speed or distance, I go out and run on a humid day and that puts me back in my place. This past summer it was extremely hard for me to run outside. Each try was a struggle, which took away my motivation.

I spent a week in South Carolina over the summer and if I didn’t get up to run by 8 am, I couldn’t because of the humidity. Humidity breaks down your body, causes difficulty with breathing and makes you sweat profusely. That is why it’s important to drink plenty of water prior to, during, and after your exercise.

Consider Your Worksite Health Options on Humid Days

Your worksite exercise staff should have a temperature chart to determine the degree of danger for outdoor exercise. If it’s dangerously hot, check out your worksite health options. Take it inside on the elliptical or treadmill at your onsite fitness center or even in your living room with a DVD. Check with your corporate fitness center staff for other indoor options. Get a schedule of the classes they offer or new equipment that will keep you safe and out of the heat and humidity.