Corporate Fitness and Active Aging

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.

When most people begin an exercise routine, the primary goal is often weight loss. Getting rid of excess weight can benefit the body in numerous ways. Another goal that can benefit the body as well but is often overlooked is improving functional capacity.

Working out to improve functional capacity, put simply, is when one strives to exercise in a way that will improve their ability to perform their activities of daily living. These activities of daily living vary from person to person and from age group to age group, but the goal is the same: To work out in the most efficient way so that the results transfer directly to how you live your life. As fitness evolves, this goal is becoming more and more commonplace, especially in retirement home fitness centers and corporate health and wellness.

Why Traditional Workouts Can Be Ineffective

While playing basketball during my free time in college, I learned the hard way that what may appear to be an effective workout may not necessarily be so. I had no problem running three or four miles at a time on a treadmill and thought that would help improve my on-court stamina. Once I began to better understand exercise science, though, I soon realized that even though I ran around the same mileage in a game, it was a very different demand in-game than what I was training for on a treadmill.

This same problem I ran into years ago can still be seen at any gym across America at any time. We often train our bodies in a way in which they don’t function in real life, simply because we haven’t questioned “common practice.” And as a result, our bodies aren’t functioning at their highest capacity.

Next: How corporate fitness programs and senior fitness management are using functional capacity training.

Corporate wellness program members hear terms like BMI, body fat percentage, girth measurements, and waist-to-hip ratio floating around on a daily basis. There is more to a person's body composition than just the number on the scale, but what number matters the most? Let's compare body mass index (BMI) to body fat percentage.

Using BMI (Body Mass Index) to Measure Employee Health

BMI is a ratio of a person's height to weight. Think of it as a chart where you would find your height on one side and your weight on the other. Connect the two dots, and boom: That number you landed on is your BMI. (Here's an online BMI calculator.)

As you can see just from that description, BMI is a very general assessment of overall body makeup. It tends to be more abstract. Tell someone that his or her BMI is 23.7 and, chances are, that won't mean much to the individual. People are classified as either underweight, normal, overweight, or obese, with no breakdown within those broad categories.

Body Fat Percentage for Determining Employee Health

Percent body fat, on the other hand, requires a more involved process for testing (including bioelectric impedance, skinfolds, underwater weighing and BodPod (air displacement) technology) to determine how much of a person's total body weight is comprised of fat versus fat-free mass (muscles, bones, organs, tissue, etc.). Body fat percentage is more telling of a person's fitness level. Two people may look the same as far as appearances go, and quite possibly have the same BMI. But they could have very different body fat amounts.

The application of percent body fat is simple. If a person weighs 160 pounds and is told his body fat is 15%, he can do the math and know that he is carrying 24 pounds of fat and 136 pounds of fat-free mass. If this person loses 10 pounds over the course of a few months and retests his percent body fat, he will have specific data to compare, whereas his BMI rating may be in the same category as it was before.

Why Percent Body Fat Is a Better Emloyee Heath Measurement

Over the years I have seen articles surface claiming things such as that BMI may not be an accurate measurement for different ethnicities, neck measurements are just as valid as BMI, etc. But percent body fat cannot be as easily argued against.

The big commonly known fault with BMI, and the reason behind its generality, is that the number does not take muscle mass into account. This makes BMI misleading in two ways:

• Firstly, a person who is underweight or normal on the BMI scale may still have a high percentage of body fat, meaning a lower level of fitness.
• On the flip side, a person with a large amount of muscle mass, for example a football player or bodybuilder, could be told by the BMI ranking that he or she is morbidly overweight, when the individual in fact has a low percent body fat and high fitness level.

I perform body composition tests in my corporate fitness center, using the Jackson-Pollock 7-site skinfold protocol, and I see these scenarios often. I have to explain the huge discrepancy when a person's BMI is in a healthy range but the body fat percentage is high, or vice versa.

The bottom line is that BMI is a general overview and can be an introductory assessment of a person's body composition. It's perhaps useful when more involved testing is not available. For more truth behind the matter, look at percent body fat.

(Further reading: See this article, which discusses the validity of both numbers.)

Although each day may technically be a new day, today brings the stresses of yesterday and the preparations of tomorrow. Nowadays a 40-hour work week is hard to come by, and going home without work is even harder to swing. With all of this added work comes added stress.

Untreated Employee Stress Is Bad for Business

Stress that is not dealt with properly can lead to negative outcomes. The outcome you will be least excited about is loss of productivity. Along with loss of productivity comes an increase in heart rate and blood pressure, headaches, upset stomach, and chest pain, and it can even worsen certain ailments employees already have.

According to an annual Harris Interactive Attitudes in the American Workplace survey, 83% of Americans reported they are at least a little stressed at work, and nearly half said they need help in learning how to manage stress.

Consider the following tips to keep your stress at bay.

Develop a Wellness and Fitness Program or add Stress Management to Your Offerings

If your company doesn't offer a worksite wellness program, get busy creating one! Worksite wellness programs offer great resources for employees to better their health, including stress management. A healthy and stress-free employee equals more productivity for the company, so it's a win for both! (See the Wellness Council of America's site for tips.)

Encourage Employees To Use Deep Breathing Techniques

Deep breathing counteracts the increased heart rate and blood pressure that happen when the body is under stress. It is one of the best ways to stay calm when the body wants to do the opposite, and it can be done anywhere. When you breathe deeply, you are sending a message to your brain and body to relax. Next time your employees feel stressed on the job, have them try these steps:

1. Sit up straight and exhale completely through your mouth.  
2. Place your hands on your stomach and slowly inhale through your mouth, pushing your hands out with your stomach.
3. Hold the inhale for two to five seconds and slowly exhale.
4. Repeat until you feel relaxed.

Encourage Exercise As A Lifestyle, Including at Work!

We've all heard about how exercise can help you maintain heart health and manage a healthy weight, but exercise can also be a great form of stress relief. Physical activity not only boosts the release of those feel-good endorphins (and in turn boosting your mood); it can also improve sleep that can so often be disrupted by stress.

If you or your employees aren't currently exercising, start slow. Choose an activity that you enjoy and maybe even consider including your friends. Making it a social activity can give you a stress-relieving social network and make you more likely to stick with the program.

The Results Are Worth the Effort

Learning to manage stress in healthy ways will keep your employees producing the work your want to see as well as keep them sane during the process. You are only as good as your body allows, and it needs to be healthy in order to perform at the top. Make every day a new day by dealing with the stresses of yesterday and breathing through the thoughts of tomorrow.  

In previous posts, I have talked about functional capacity and how corporate fitness programs and senior fitness classes are using this concept to improve workouts and make them more beneficial to everyday life.

But what about the average person? How can they improve their functional capacity? Should they even seek to? Everyone, whether young or simply young at heart, can and should strive to improve their functional capacity.

Start By Evaluating Your Own Life.

What types of movements do you typically utilize? What does your day consist of? From here, seek out someone who can help you design an exercise program to help you improve directly on the movements and muscles you most frequently use in your day:

• If you are on your feet a lot and on the move, starting a running or walking program can help improve your endurance, making your job that much easier.
• If you are glued to a chair the majority of your day, you may find it beneficial to work on the strength of the muscles in your upper back, neck, and shoulders to ward off any pain and changes in posture that may be lingering.
• If you are a recreational athlete, utilizing a program that will help you improve in a way that directly benefits your sport skills can be an exciting challenge. Fitness has evolved, and gone are the days of sitting down and doing bicep curls and triceps kickbacks every workout.

Join the movement and strive to get on your feet more, move, and train your body in the way in which it works every day. The improvements you’ll experience in both your health and your performance in everyday activities will be well worth it.