In this episode of the podcast, we discuss how you could go about encouraging health in older individuals.
How do we get older individuals to change their health?
This is something that older individuals struggle with, children struggle to help their parents, and personal trainers/coaches struggle to help their clients with. There is no easy answer, but the goal of this episode of the podcast is to create some sort of road map and come up with potential solutions to problems ahead of time.
- Habit change is actually incredibly hard
- The biggest issue to overcome is not some sort of physiological limitation, it is overcoming previous “bad” habits, building new “good” habits and ultimately finding time to fit everything into their life
So we have to tackle this from two angles, identifying the high yield items and then how do we integrate that into their/your life.
Identifying the Problem(s)
In an ideal scenario, we would go after the biggest ticket items first and foremost (i.e. we would Triage your problems). This is the benefit of having a coach, they are able to identify the big ticket items and craft a plan to tackle them.
However, in general, most people aren’t managing their body composition, their diet is not supportive of their goals, they aren’t as active as they should be, and their sleep and stress management is not where it needs to be either.
We have 4 big levers for health improvement:
- Sleep
- Stress management
- Exercise
- Diet
We can work on them all, or we can work on 1 at a time, but they are all interconnected. Improving one generally improves another, and a lot of the habits that improve one lead to improvements to another.
What are the high yield items, and how do you make change in your life?
Sleep
- Sleep 8 hours per night
- Set an actual schedule for this.
- Improve your pre-sleep routine.
- Reduce water and food closer to bed.
- Reduce caffeine intake (especially later in the day) and reduce alcohol consumption (destroys sleep for most people).
- Get sleep apnea/snoring sorted
Baseline Exercise
- Increase general activity levels (NEAT and steps)
- Get an activity tracking watch or use your phone for activity tracking.
- Set ambitious, but achievable targets (i.e. just do more than you currently do).
- Try to incorporate movement into your day where possible (i.e. take the stairs versus the lift and park further away from you job or the shop etc.)
- Try to have some time set aside for general activity, rather than just hoping it will happen (i.e. make a plan for this)
Diet
- Improving the diet
- Becoming aware of calories
- tracking is a good thing to learn, but ultimately we want to transition to a more portion based approach
- make better food choices for your goal and identify any easy food swaps
- there is no need to eat a completely foreign diet, you can just eat more or less of the same types of foods that are being eaten
- A better spread of calories (i.e. stop skipping breakfast and having a massive dinner)
- Have a plan for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and snacks
- Eating more fruit and veg
- Buy frozen veg if prepping it is the issue
- Learn new recipes that incorporate fruit/veg
- Switch out snacks for fruit
- Eating more protein
- People generally don’t eat enough protein, so finding ways to increase this is a good idea
- Get a better spread of protein intake
- Reducing saturated fat intake
- Swap butter for olive oil
- Becoming aware of calories
Exercise
- Resistance training
- 2-3 times per week
- Full body sessions
- This is likely to be one of the harder things to get started with, so it would be incredibly helpful to get some sort of in-person guidance here
- Local gyms usually have some sort of on boarding process
- Younger generations (children/grandchildren) or friends/family can be a great help in showing people how to exercise
- Starting with machines is also a good idea, purely because it is much harder to mess things up
- 2-3 times per week
- Dedicated cardio work
- Focus on aerobic work
- Post-workout cardio
- 10-15 minutes of aerobic work
- shorter higher intensity work can work but it does have limitations
- Dedicated cardio sessions
- Aerobic sessions
- Classes
- Managing pain and injury
- If you haven’t been moving your body in a long time, you will have to ease into things
- Progress range slowly, learn your limitations and don’t force yourself into positions you simply aren’t comfortable with
- Your body will get stronger over time, especially if you are consistent. The biggest barrier you will likely run into here is being inconsistent. That way you are always at the beginner level, and thus always trying to overcome those “teething pains”. A little bit consistently, is much better than a lot sporadically.
- You may have specific injuries or limitations, and these will likely need to be dealt with by a specialist or at least a professional.
Stress Management
- Improve your stress management practices
- Usually improves with better sleep and getting the diet and exercise habits sorted.
- Organising your life, and getting better at planning and scheduling
- Learning better coping mechanisms
- Journalling
- Meditation
- Mindfullness
- CBT
- Self care (engage in hobbies and things that make you happy)
- “I don’t have time” = you actually get less and less productive if you don’t do this stuff. It is the same as trying to sprint a marathon, rather than pacing yourself.
- Get professional help
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