Longevity, Vitality, Health:

We will achieve our mission by training in ways that increase your health-span and therefore your quality of life.

Our focus is on training, nutrition and community.

Training because fitness is the metric that influences all cause mortality the most.
Nutrition because you can’t out train an awful diet even if the physical training helps you out-run the immediate consequences.
Community because emotional health makes life worth living, keeps you accountable and more consistent.

Reverse decline:
Ageing always ends with decline and death, but getting old, even very old doesn’t have to guarantee frailty, loss of independence, weakness, mental decline and misery. The aim is to reverse decline to compress the morbidity of ageing into the final tiny sliver of life. We want you to be strong, vigorous and useful to the last.

Ignored demographic:
Older adults are a largely ignored demographic; one that consumes a disproportionate amount of health and social care resources. Many of this group’s co-morbidities and problems are avoidable. Healthcare for the elderly mostly aims at treating disease caused by ageing and decline rather than addressing, delaying and reversing the decline itself. This is not a dig at health care professionals, they have a limited tool set, are under-resourced and face acute life and death problems every day.

Solving the problem of long term decline requires daily doses of quality nutrition, community, friendship, support, as well as strength, stability, cardio, balance and mobility training and is best started as early as possible. After all what builds capacity, maintains capacity.

Loneliness & mental health:
Loneliness is an epidemic driving misery and mental health issues, especially depression. We are social animals. It is heart-breaking to hear stories about older adults and many not so old people where the only human interaction they might get is with at the supermarket checkout once a week. FitSpring plans on training older adults to become coaches so that they can create viable micro-communities in garage gyms or similar spaces that change the fitness & social landscape for older people. This will give the coach a purpose and a business as well as create a local community that has staying fit and healthy at its heart.

Fitness levels & death rate: Comparing the fittest to the least fit older adults:
Unfit women had a 4.5 x chance of dying than the fit group.
Unfit men had a 3.5 x chance of dying than the fit group.
This was true even if the people in each group had two or three other risk factors such as heart disease, the rates of death were still lower in those who were more aerobically fit. E.g. a diagnosis of heart disease or diabetes or whatever isn’t necessarily a death sentence if you get yourself fit enough.

Change is possible with the right intervention:
The study quoted above took a group of the least fit men and trained them aerobically. The average improvement was a 44% reduction in mortality, the highest (for 50-59 year olds) was a 70% reduction in mortality.

Our Vision:

1. Halt, delay and reverse the onset and rapidity of decline and chronic disease so that you experience more years of independent, healthy life.
2. Train and qualify as many people as possible how to coach. Encourage as many people, especially those 40+ to pursue and find purpose and passion for helping others in this demographic.
3. Promote the establishment of micro-gyms to provide specialist knowledge, community and a training environment tailored to the older population.

We want feedback, input, great ideas, other subject matter experts to chip in with options and other ways of doing things.

Building an Army:
We are trying to build a coalition of experts and volunteers willing to get involved to change the world for the better.
If you can organise, write, film, coach, inspire, lead, manage, edit, (or anything else you think might be helpful) or you are in a caring or medical profession dealing with older adults, get in touch. We want to hear from you

Brian & the FitSpring team