All About Healthspan
Our tagline is ‘Healthspan, not Lifespan.’ What we mean by that is it’s really focusing not on the years in your life, but the life in your years. In other words, it’s about living a healthy life for as long as that is, as opposed to striving to live a long life where the last 15, 20 years may be punctuated by serious disease and ill health.
So it’s really thinking about what you can do now and in the future to guarantee yourself the longest possible healthspan.
Shifting Our Focus To Healthspan
Shifting our focus away from longevity and lifespan to a healthy life or ‘healthspan’, that in itself is a big concept. It really takes a bit of a shift for many people, to ensure that what we do today, isn’t costing us further down the line. In other words, we’re not sacrificing future health for present pleasure.
Become A Business Athlete
We are all busy with work and family life. And very often physical activity, diet, sleep etc. are neglected. That’s where the concept of the Business Athlete comes in. This is the idea that we see ourselves like an athlete, we get ready for big events by doubling down on sleep, on nutrition, on hydration. And then we make time to recover after those big events. Now those big events might be life events. It could be big periods of work. Anything of that sort where, you know, you’ve got to be really ready and on your game. But we know that you can’t sustain that top level of performance all year round. So then you drop your level a bit and you recover.
The essence of today’s message is all about recovery. Thinking of yourself as a business athlete, getting ready for those big events. The business athlete plans in the recovery so that they can re-optimise, recover and get ready to go again. If you do that, you’re more resilient, meaning you’ve got the tools and resources to be able to react to a big event when it comes in.
The Importance Of Recovery
Recovery can be many different things. It’s not feet up on the sofa with a beer or a cup of tea, doing nothing. It can be relaxing on the sofa with something hydrating, but it could also be spending time with loved ones, doing something you love like a hobby or a passion. It could be taking a walk, being with animals, being in nature, a bath, a massage etc. All of those things are recovery based or recovery promoting. Like everything in health, it’s very individualised.
So I would like to ask you:
- What do you do to recover?
- Do you get enough recovery?
- Can you see in advance, in the next few weeks, or next few months, in your diary when you might need to plan in a little bit more recovery so that you can be optimising your healthspan as well as your lifespan.