The Live 2 B Healthy® Vision Statement:
“To Be a Bridge to Renewed Wellness”
I was contacted by one of our Regional Owners this week to write some press releases for a couple of his senior communities following our just-completed round of October fitness testing. As I was writing these press releases, and highlighting results like a 92% Increase in Upper Body Strength at Bethany Meadows in Sioux Falls, SD and an 84% Increase in Balance at Fellowship Village in Inwood, Iowa, it occurred to me what these numbers actually indicated.
These numbers show improvement in balance, improvement in strength and improvement in flexibility. Which, is probably exactly what you would expect if your average 40 year old person started to attend a fitness class 3 times per week. But, improvement in an aging population? These senior living community residents being tested are in their 70s-80s-90s and beyond! When is the last time you heard someone talking about improvement in physical condition among seniors? This is exactly the news I was writing for these senior communities to share with their local news outlets.
When I started at Live 2 B Healthy® in 2013 as Marketing Director, one of the first things I remember Cory Czepa, Founder and President, pointing out to me was the Vision Statement framed on our office wall. He said, “You see that? We are saying a ‘Bridge to IMPROVED Wellness’. We are not just looking to restore them to what society has come to expect of ‘normal aging seniors’. We actually designed this program to restore our participants to a level of health that they may have thought they would never see again. We have seen results that are consistent with people 10-20 years younger than our normal class participants.”
Basically, what we do when we go in to start a new class is, within the first 2 weeks of class, our trainers conduct a series of proprietary fitness evaluations, designed to measure balance, strength and flexibility. All of our tests are designed for differing levels of mobility and ability, so that we can test everyone. Following our initial baseline tests, we then conduct follow-up tests every October and May. We share these results with our community management teams and with our participants. We celebrate these victories and successes.
If you were in charge of placing a loved one into an assisted living community, would you rather place him/her into a place that promised you they would provide physical therapy to restore movement in their knees, or a community that told you they had seen a 92% Increase in Lower Body Strength among their class participants – like Bethany Meadows has since starting their program in July 2017?
These significant indications of growth and progress are particularly amazing because they are being demonstrated among a population that many expect to be losing physical ability. Our senior class participants, on the other hand, are bucking the trend and regaining levels of fitness that many may have thought were gone for good. Many studies have shown that regular exercise allows seniors to improve their health and regain control of their daily living activities. Live 2 B Healthy® has proven just that, having seen improvements in participants’ balance, sleeping and eating habits, improved cognitive skills, reduced medication, and reduced number of falls.
