Nutrition, Strength And Conditioning
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Maximizing Health and Fitness: A Strategic Approach
Time is the enemy of all. Managing your health and fitness randomly is inefficient. Is there a better way?
Strategic Health Management: Principles and Importance
If you are designing an off-season performance program for a world-class athlete, time is the greatest enemy, so the design must be strategic to maximize the return on time and resources available without injury. Time is also the enemy of the general population when looking at Health span vs Lifespan. Even if you are not trying to win an Olympic gold medal, your time is of great value, and the goal should be to both improve your lifespan and elevate your health span. In managing billions of dollars, sophisticated allocations are developed based on the Nobel Prize-winning concept of modern portfolio theory. The objective is to maximize return with the least amount of risk. Create an optimum portfolio of risk-return. Similar principles should be applied when creating a strategy for your Health Span vs Lifespan.
Developing an Optimal Health Portfolio: Steps and Strategies
Randomly choosing time and money invested into exercise, sleep, nutrition, and mental health needs to be updated if you want to be successful and reach optimum performance levels. We have a ton of data available today, but allocating to the different levers available to manage your health is randomly applied and inefficient. Below are some steps that will help you when you are looking to build an optimum portfolio of Health.
STEP 1: Determining your health and wellness status.
STEP 2: Where would you like to see your health and wellness in 3 months, a year, or three years? What are your health biomarkers telling you?
STEP 3: Establish available time and resources that can be marshaled to improve your health and wellness. This should not be viewed as a cost but as an investment. People who reframe the concept will have a much higher success rate, as some obstacles will disappear.
STEP 4: Prioritize where the time and resources should be spent based on urgent needs first and what can be accomplished based on the time and resources. Spend your time where you will obtain the greatest improvement in the least amount of time. Your health portfolio should initially contain the following buckets if you want to improve your health span. The priority of the buckets would be based on the individual data and goals established. The first four primary buckets to allocate resources to are the following:
- Nutrition/Health Status
- Exercise/Fitness
- Sleep/Recovery
- Stress/Mindfulness
You need to address these buckets first and foremost based on individual goals and status today. The initial goal is to better allocate the time currently spent on addressing these buckets and then determine if the reallocation of time will be enough or if more resources need to be spent to obtain the desired result.
Nutrition/Health Status
You would look at health optimization with “Food as Medicine.” One wants to look at biomarkers in bloodwork, body composition, cardiovascular health, overall fitness, and performance.
Exercise/Fitness
Global fitness performance measures strength, strength endurance, mobility, stability, power, power endurance, cardio output Zone 2, HIIT outputs and maximum oxygen delivery Vo2 max, oxygen utilization.
Sleep/Recovery
This is often an overlooked part of the portfolio. It is typically sprinkled into a week or month. One needs to evaluate the levers that can be employed for great sleep. Nutrient timing, supplements, sleep monitoring, sleep preparation. In addition, other recovery modalities are used to maintain optimum performance.
Stress/Mindfulness
This one can be underestimated. Work seems to be a priority, and health is an afterthought when it collides with your work. However, there are a lot of tools that can be utilized to integrate this into a lifestyle. Meditation practices can be microdosed into one’s day.
We are all risk managers in one form or another. In our practice, we are utilizing the principles of modern portfolio theory and risk management to develop optimum health and wellness portfolios. Are you? Why not?
