Corporate Fitness and Active Aging

The individualized exercise prescription continues to be a strong driver of resident engagement in fitness programming in the senior living communities we serve. The approach is highly personalized and we have helped residents prepare for vacations with the grandkids, train for an upcoming golf season, focus on balance training, and condition for mountain hiking trips. The unique motivations for residents to begin or adapt their exercise routine are always inspiring. I have been working in fitness in the senior living industry for almost 20 years and the resident success stories we hear never get old and always bring a smile to my face. Hearing about individuals reclaiming their independence, achieving new goals, and gaining confidence is powerful and we are fortunate to work in a field that allows us to play a role in these accomplishments.

I had the pleasure of receiving the following feedback from Ashlie Burnett, our client contact at the Heritage at Brentwood in Brentwood, Tennessee this fall regarding our fitness manager, Tim Parrott and his work with a resident.

“Earlier today I walked past the Group Exercise Studio and noticed a resident was dancing with Tim. (Not actively, but Tim was present and nearby.) In conversation, I asked Tim and he said this resident has started and stopped a fitness routine every few months. He finally asked her specific goals and she said to dance. He decided to turn her exercise prescription into dance! Tim said after dancing for a couple of minutes she loosens up and her balance improves slightly. This is such a great example of functional fitness! Tim is a great addition to The Heritage and resource for residents.”     – Ashlie

According to resident Mrs. Nona Jane Kroha on her exercise prescription, “It has given me an impetus to move forward!”

As the end of 2020 approaches, there are daily reminders that life has changed. For some, these reminders are feelings of loneliness that didn’t exist just a few months ago. Older adults are at the highest level of risk for severe illness from COVID-19 and older adults are also at an increased risk of depression, as many are more isolated than ever. Now here’s the good news: there has never been a better time to be creative at home. Discovering and exercising creativity benefits people of all ages by directing time and energy into something positive, helping maintain or improve dexterity and coordination, and providing an opportunity for safe social interaction.

Much to be Gained

Even for people who don’t consider themselves creative, there is much to be gained by experimenting with creation. If boredom at home is your issue, try turning off the TV and put your hands and mind to work. It may not sound like fun at first, but nothing makes time fly like learning a new skill or adopting a new hobby. With the holidays approaching, now is the absolute best time to start hand-making presents for friends and family. Apps like Pinterest and YouTube have countless blogs and videos to provide instruction on how to complete a variety of projects and crafts.

Physical Benefits

Some creative endeavors like sculpting and building can be physically demanding. Working hard to create something can be just as good for your body as exercise, but you don’t have to break a sweat! Embroidery, drawing, painting, woodcarving, and other handcrafts are fantastic exercises in dexterity and hand-eye coordination. When parts of your body work together to create something or accomplish a goal, the connection between those systems can be maintained or even improved. The arts that mankind has been doing for millennia have stuck around because, among other reasons, they’re good for you.

Getting Back Out There

Regular involvement in social activities is essential for healthy aging. This can look different for everybody, but the importance of engagement cannot be understated. There are a number of opportunities to explore within senior living communities to help seniors be socially engaged while staying safe. Art classes are relatively easy to socially distance, as an artist will usually prefer to have plenty of elbow room anyway. Woodworking clubs are usually small groups and tool handles are easily cleaned. In the community I serve, a group of residents called the handcrafters get together weekly to knit. When I asked about the benefit of their group, one handcrafter said, “With nothing else going on, it is much easier to knit and be guilt-free about spending my time knitting. When I can’t go anywhere, I can sit down and enjoy my handcrafting.”   Small, safe groups of common creativity are powerful.

Whether you are taking up a new hobby or honing your skills on a lifelong pastime, consider the added benefits to your overall well-being to be socially engaged and creative.

What is your favorite creative outlet or favorite past-time activity?

Group exercise classes are one of the top activities in senior living communities nowadays. With the increasing number of activities provided on community calendars, having a good group exercise program significantly impacts the overall resident well-being as they participate in their daily activities.

The initial spark of having a new group fitness class promotes a tremendous buzz throughout the community, and the new activity on the calendar generates a lot of popularity. Participation is high, and residents look forward to this new class to see what’s in store for them at the next session. A month or so down the road, however, you may notice that the residents who were highly motivated to attend a particular exercise class have begun to feel less interested in the routine, potentially causing a decrease in participation.

When people are acclimated to an established exercise routine, there may come a point where they feel tired of doing the same exercises over and over again, or don’t feel challenged enough in the journey to an improved quality of life. If you begin to notice these things in your exercise programs, it might be time to make some minor adjustments. However, that doesn’t mean that you have to turn your group exercise program on its head and start from scratch.  Spice up group fitness routines for seniors and keep them interested.

As an exercise instructor who thinks about these things on a daily basis, one of my primary goals is to encourage participation in our group exercise classes on a regular basis, regardless of their skill level. I actively think of different ways of keeping residents enthusiastic about our classes, while still maintaining their overall purpose. While residents want to exercise safely, they also want to be appropriately challenged so that they don’t lose the benefit of maintaining an active lifestyle.

Following are three different strategies that I have used in the past to keep residents interested in classes.

Mixing Up the Exercises in Your Routines

Adding different exercises into your routines will help keep your residents interested, and can increase cognition as they perform exercises that focus on balance and hand-eye coordination. A good way to map this out is to try one new exercise per class, and see how your residents respond to it. If they find enjoyment in the sequence, you are on the right track! Varying your group exercise sequences every month or two can go a long way in maintaining resident interest.

Another effective strategy that helps in mixing up your routines is to have two or three different formats for one particular class, and to rotate through those formats. I have always found that having a couple routines that I could rotate through on a weekly or monthly basis keeps people more engaged.

Incorporate Music into Your Classes

Whether it’s a choreographed mix-tape that has a variety of upbeat songs for low-impact aerobic routines, or a Big Band CD that is used simply as a background filler for the class, you will notice an immediate increase in residents’ mood in the class, and in some cases they might even get into the groove as the music is playing in class. Having a mixture of upbeat tunes along with songs requested by your residents will keep the excitement going in class. Music can also serve as a motivational factor for residents when they are participating in classes, because exercising to music can have psychological benefits that include improved cognition, reduced anxiety, and many more.

Interactive Exercises

Most people think of group exercise as performing certain routines in a repetitive motion for a certain amount of weight, repetitions, and sets. While in certain class formats that may work, it does not always have to be that way. For most of my exercise classes, I mainly focus on exercises that mirror our activities of daily living (ADLs), and also include sequences that incorporate the mind/body connection. The National Institute for Health (NIH) has an extensive list of various exercises that are both interactive, and ways to focus the class on functionality. Nontraditional balance exercises such as ankle spelling and ball tosses will keep your members guessing both physically and cognitively.

Make sure to use these strategies to spice up your senior living community exercise classes! Keep an open mind when trying out new things in your classes; see what works, and spice things up! 

Start with evaluating your balance classes and maximize your Balance Program by downloading our whitepaper!

Throughout 2015, we’ll be blogging about our dreams for corporate wellness, fitness, and aging well.  Some of the content will represent a gentle “poking fun” at the industry, but it’s all written to stimulate thought about what really could be if we put our heads together and started mapping out what’s really possible in the realm of individual wellbeing.  We hope you’ll join the conversation by commenting on the blogs, giving us additional ideas about which to write, and/or by finding us out on Twitter at #wellnesswhatif.

We do a lot of wellness consulting in senior living, and by “wellness”, I mean non-clinical, lifestyle-focused consulting.  For many of our clients, that consulting relationship involves a thorough review of their “activities” department; in other cases, it’s focused more on what’s happening with their exercise program.  Regardless of the original area of focus, we always arrive at the same point – building a strategy that allows the community to shift from filling a calendar toward supporting resident purpose and passion.

Often, when I talk with a client who thinks he’s interested in having us come onsite to consult, there’s a heavy discussion about cost.  And while I certainly understand a business’s sensitivity toward expenses, I often wonder:  If budget (and occupancy – the two are inextricably linked) was no obstacle, what would you be expecting from your activities department?

Leadership in senior living communities have a lot to focus on, and it makes sense that activities might not rank near the top.  In fact, it’s common for that department to be well-liked by residents and to be well rated on satisfaction surveys.  So no pain point exists because there doesn’t appear to be an issue.  The challenge with continuing to look the other way is two-fold:

1. Your current residents may not realize what’s possible, so putting your faith in them to be your barometer for when something needs to change is ill-placed.  That is particularly true with activities because that area of your community traditionally bears out the 80/20 rule where 20% of your residents engage in 80% of the activities.  You are likely supporting the interests of a vocal minority in your community.  And the question becomes: What is your activities department developing to meet the needs and interests of the less-engaged majority? 
2. The adult child knows better.  They are not content with bingo, cards, and trips to the theatre, and they won’t be fooled by a full calendar that lacks opportunities for them to live out passions, dreams, and purpose. 

If you think your programming is top notch and you perhaps just have an engagement challenge, take a look at our slideshare on how to get your residents to engage.

Maybe you know wellness is an important differentiator for your community, but you really feel compelled to nail down a more favorable and consistent occupancy rate before you begin fine tuning programming and other lighter elements at your community.  I can see why you’d adopt that philosophy, but before you stake your claim there, consider reading this blog on how and why wellness is an important differentiator for any community.

Think also about the long term investment of putting in some money up front on wellness consulting that breathes new life into your campus and creates a new outlook on how activities are developed and delivered.  It’s a chicken and egg debate but if a $5,000 investment could be an important step toward solidifying occupancy and thus improving your budget outlook, would that $5,000 be worth it?

Here’s our picture of what it means to do wellness better in senior living:

• When you do wellness better, you have data your marketing and sales staff can work with to back up their stories with prospects about how fantastic it is to live well at your community. 
• When you do wellness better, you have more diverse, robust, and life-enriching programming on your calendar that appeals to a wide audience. 
• When you do wellness better in your community, you create natural bridges across departments for collaborative programming so that one over-worked activities director doesn’t have to do it all. 
• When you do wellness better you understand individual resident passions and interests and incorporate those at the personal and program level to ensure opportunities where you residents can live with vitality in the ways that are true for them. 
• When you do wellness better, you do so much more than fill a calendar.  You map out a program and service strategy, informed by data, resident interests, and past successes.

If you think your community may be falling short in one or more of those areas, check out what we have to offer in the way consulting to help you do wellness better.