How cool would it be if your insurance company paid for indoor cycling classes?
A national policy of Prescriptive Exercise would be the holy grail* for small studio owners.
Imagine; A new client walks in with her doctor specified exercise regimen for you to “fill”, just like at a pharmacy. As an approved provider, you and your studio would provide the required exercise and then bill the clients insurance company… and not at your normal class rate – at a much higher rate in recognition of your fitness expertise.
A fantasy? Nope**, not if you're near The Wellness Institute in Winnipeg Canada. Doctors there are actually writing detailed prescriptions for exercise. How cool is that?
Doctors at a unique medical facility in Winnipeg are starting to write some unusual prescriptions.
“A lap a day keeps the doctor away” is one of the mottos at the Seven Oaks Wellness Institute (SOWI), a fitness facility attached to the Seven Oaks General Hospital on Leila Avenue, where doctors have started prescribing exercise instead of pills.
Dr. Kevin Saunders is one of the founders of the SOWI and the medical director. He said exercise is an effective treatment for all kinds of illnesses, including hypertension, Type 2 diabetes, high cholesterol and even some forms of cancer.
The facility offers clients a more holistic approach to fitness, helping people from all walks of life to understand what kinds of exercise they should be doing, and what they need to avoid if it puts their health in jeopardy.
You'll note that what Dr. Sanders is targeting with this program are Special Populations of people who would benefit from physical activity. I'm guessing you'd have a little trouble getting a prescription for a USAT Triathlon coach to get you ready for your next Ironman 🙂
What has me most excited here is the potential for prescriptive exercise for people suffering from Parkinson's Disease. It's been shown repeatedly that people of all ages with PD respond well to Indoor Cycling classes. Especially classes that are designed and taught by a Parkinson's Cycling Coach. Indoor Cycling studios already have the necessary tools to conduct this hugely beneficial classes. They're best held around 10:30 – 11:30 in the morning, which is normally a time without a scheduled class
I did some research and found an excellent article here at emedicine.medscape.com that explains in detail what Perscriptive Exercise is (different from physical rehab) and includes a number of areas where exercise is typically prescribed by a physiian.
Background
Exercise prescription commonly refers to the specific plan of fitness-related activities that are designed for a specified purpose, which is often developed by a fitness or rehabilitation specialist for the client or patient. Due to the specific and unique needs and interests of the client/patient, the goal of exercise prescription should be successful integration of exercise principles and behavioral techniques that motivates the participant to be compliant, thus achieving their goals.[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]
Components of exercise prescription
An exercise prescription generally includes the following specific recommendations:
Type of exercise or activity (eg, walking, swimming, cycling)
Specific workloads (eg, watts, walking speed)
Duration and frequency of the activity or exercise session
Intensity guidelines — Target heart rate (THR) range and estimated rate of perceived exertion (RPE)
Precautions regarding certain orthopedic (or other) concerns or related comments
Note that a properly structured, Power based Indoor Cycling class would easily include all of the stated components.
Consider this simple prescription:
Type of exercise or activity – Indoor Cycling class.
Specific workloads – Below, @ and Above riders observed 4 minute Best Effort PTP Watts or FTP if known
Duration and frequency of the activity or exercise session – 3 x 60 min classes weekly
Intensity guidelines — each 60 class to include: 5 x 5 min intervals @ PTP, 3 x 1 min intervals Above PTP, that remainder of class Below PTP and Above VT1 (staying aerobic) + adequate recovery after each @/Above interval.
Precautions – None
What you'd have is essentially an endurance training program, written by an MD.
Taking this further. If you were to incorporate the rider's performance data capture, from a Display Training system like Performance IQ or Spivi, your doctor could review your progress = make informed recommendations for future exercise prescriptions. Wouldn't that be awesome?
If you can offer any additional information about prescriptive exercise, I'd love to hear from you!
*Yes, I'm aware that many insurance programs offer a discount/rebate for club dues – if you attend a speciaf number of days a month. This is very different.
** I don't know the specifics of Canada's reimbursement system, but I'm looking into it. I have asked for a representative join me on the Podcast to discuss all of this.
I’d like to ask for your help with an extremely important campaign. The campaign is to raise money for pregnant women with metabolic disorders: diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, low “good” cholesterol, obesity, insulin resistance, and more. These metabolic conditions make it more likely that the moms-to-be will give birth to babies that develop autism.
I specialize in reversing these metabolic disorders through nutrition. I want to help get these pregnant women healthy, so they can give birth to healthy babies that stay healthy. This is significant and worthwhile — and I definitely need your help.
The research linking metabolic disorders in pregnant women and babies that develop autism is new. Researchers are worried that autism will increase due to rising obesity rates nationally, which, of course, impacts pregnant women. No one to my knowledge, however, is targeting the cause of these metabolic conditions at the root level — specifically, the nutrition of the pregnant women.
These metabolic conditions can be completely reversed; I've been helping people reverse metabolic syndrome for 20 years. I would now like to target pregnant women and try to reduce the incidence of autism.
Please help by donating if you can and/or by spreading the word and letting your friends, family and coworkers know about this campaign. Any support they can offer would be greatly appreciated.
I truly believe we can make a difference by reversing a problem that looks as if it will only get worse — unless people like you help to stop it! Thank you for your support and your willingness to help.
Here’s a link that will take you to the Indiegogo site, where you can get more information on this important campaign: ‪http://goo.gl/ouS9NR ‬
Fitness author Pamela Light joins me to discuss her article in the latest IDEA Fitness Journal — Crystal-Clear Cuing for Indoor Cycling. In it, Pamela encourages Instructors to: Be smart about the exertion scale you use to help participants get the best ride.
Excellent Instructors use a system to describe what they expect for performance, and it's usually a combination of what they've learned in certification courses and what they've gleaned through real-world experience. Indoor Cycling teachers often rely on numbers to convey effort. While this is a good idea at face value, there are many variations on a theme.
Listen below to Pamela expand on each of the seven component parts she feels are important to Crystal Clear Cuing!
No more hunting for new music or counting out cues to develop your ride profile. Here is your ready to ride profile for a fully choreographed ride, that can be displayed from your phone, or printed out onto cue cards for your class. This ride is timed out, down to the second, to make your life as easy as possible!
I love discovering smart, talented people who are passionate about Indoor Cycling and Lena Hershey is someone I feel you should get to know. Lena is a brand new (she started in May) Spinning® Instructor at the Carlisle Family YMCA in Carlisle, PA.
Lena's journey to become a Spinning Instructor began with a pretty large life event – moving from her native Russia to the United States three years ago. While you listen keep in mind that English is her second language 🙂
She describes what happens next at her blog LeanLena.com
My name is Lena. This blog is mostly about my way to my personal transformation — from the body I have been abusing and neglecting for the most of my life, to the body I always wanted to have — fit, strong and beautiful.
I am not there yet, but you can see the progress
I write about my exercise program/routines and my meals, share healthy recipes, health tips, etc. etc.
I have started this journey on an ordinary day in February 2013. I was in the car with my husband and two step-kids, driving home from somewhere when I said: “I will go and work out at the YMCA every day for a month starting today”. Just like that — out of the blue. I can’t even remember why I said that or what prompted that decision. I just said that and once I did, I had to do it. So I did.
Once I was done with one month, I just couldn’t stop. I did adjust my exercise program by now and I am not working out every single day, but I am doing so much more for myself thanks to that decision in February of 2013.
Results — I’ve lost almost 20 pounds (9 kg) and counting, I am 2 sizes down in clothes, and I feel lighter, better, healthier and happier than ever.
A previous post covered ways that sugar can increase fat consumption. One way is that fat makes sugary foods taste sweeter. That may mean a sugar/fat combination tastes preferable to a sugar-only food, such as hard candy.
Clients have told me that, when they eliminate sugar from their diets, they can actually enjoy snacking on a brown rice cake topped with a slice of tomato or sprouts.
When they’ve been eating sugary foods, though, such a snack seems unappealing and unpalatable. At those sugar-laden times, they find themselves wanting different things: bologna or salami sandwiches, for example, or other heavy foods.
Those heavier foods have more fat in them than the first snack, so the clients are consuming extra fat — even though they weren’t necessarily seeking high-fat foods in the first place.
In my dissertation, I named this “secondary fat consumption.”
Secondary fat consumption can occur in several different ways:[private PRO-Platinum|PRO-Monthly|PRO-Gratis|PRO-Seasonal|Platinum-trial|Monthly-trial|PRO-Military|30-Days-of-PRO|90 Day PRO|Stages-Instructor|Schwinn-Instructor|PRO-Studio|28 Day Challenge]
– We eat more of a fatty food (like peanut butter) when we have sugar (jelly) to eat with it and make it taste better.
– We eat sugar, which triggers endorphins, as explained above. That shifts our preferences to other foods that trigger endorphins — to more sugar or to high-fat foods, or both.
– We crave something sweet and want the sweetest taste we can get — so we instinctively choose a sugar/fat combination, instead of, say, a hard candy with sugar only.
Unfortunately, that’s not the worst of it. High-fat foods we eat trigger the hormone ghrelin. To me, it always seemed like a Monster Hormone.
For one thing, ghrelin slows metabolism. Who wants that?
At the same time, ghrelin stimulates the part of the brain that increases appetite (the lateral hypothalamus). That gives “secondary fat” a chance to increase calories — not only through the secondary fat calories themselves, but also through all the other foods we might suddenly want to eat simply because that secondary fat has triggered ghrelin and our appetite.
It’s obvious that there’s potential for a self-perpetuating cycle in this, and that it can toboggan its way down a slippery slope and pick up speed.
It also seems obvious that — bottom line — sugar is the culprit in this metabolic mess.
Avoiding sugar is one important factor in transforming your health, increasing your energy, and feeling great. Heart disease, the #1 cause of death in the U.S., has been linked with inflammation. So have diabetes, hypertension, cancer, and more.
Inflammation is strongly affected by nutrition, and sugar’s effect on insulin and hormones makes it a strong contributor to inflammation. Dare I advise, yet again, not to eat it?[/private]
