This week’s Thrive in Five is all about healthspan
This is the first of a series of videos we’re going to be sharing 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
Now, 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.
Our healthspan not lifespan series
For the next four weeks, we’re going to go into real specifics on what you can focus on, giving you actionable insights into things you can implement to support this shift in focus.
The Cadence Approach™
The Cadence Approach™ is a concept you may have heard us talk about before. 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 corporate athlete, getting ready for those big events. They plan 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.
So that’s it for me. We look forward to talking to you next week, stay healthy or the very best for now.
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