How You Can Incorporate Longevity into the Fitness Equation: Longevity-Based Fitness Coaching

People exercise for various reasons. One can pursue fitness for physical appearance, success, joy, community, or a healthier and longer life, also known as healthy longevity. Generally, clients have one or more motivators to keep improving. Without a doubt, the majority want to live healthier, longer lives. So why not leverage this desire for your coaching business? It’s a win-win situation.

As evidence suggests, exercise promotes longevity, but nobody wants to live longer with health problems or a low quality of life. There is a fine balance between exercise contributing to health and deteriorating it. Because it’s not just about exercising more; it’s also about cultivating personal nuances in nutrition and lifestyle for the best outcomes. So, there is no one training program that fits all. This is where you show up and provide customized, longevity-based fitness planning for clients.

What Is Longevity, Lifespan, and Healthspan? 

Let’s first cover the most commonly used longevity-related terms.

• Lifespan is the maximum number of years a person has lived.
• Life expectancy, or average lifespan, is how long a person is expected to live based on age, gender, birthplace, and demographic factors. For example, life expectancy for women is 80.2 years and for men is 74.8 years in the U.S.
• Healthspan refers to the number of years a person lives in good health. For example, a person’s lifespan might be 80 years, but their healthspan could be 65 years. 
• Longevity refers to the length of lifespan under ideal conditions. But the term ‘longevity’ doesn’t differentiate between healthy years and unhealthy years of life. So, increased longevity isn’t really a good thing if healthspan doesn’t increase along with it. People not only want to live longer but also aim to live healthier until death. This is why coaching for longevity should focus on improving both life expectancy and healthspan.

How Does Fitness Contribute to Healthy Longevity?

Evidence from 2.6 million participants shows that sports can reduce the risk of dying from any cause by 21% to 24%. The reduction is even greater for deaths caused by heart disease, with a decrease of up to 27%. Exercise promotes healthy longevity by:

• Increasing muscle mass and strength
• Strengthening bones
• Improving metabolism
• Increasing cardiorespiratory fitness
• Improving cognitive and mental health
• Supporting the immune system

In order to promote healthy longevity, you need sustainability. The good news is that this is much easier with personalized fitness coaching.

Longevity-Based Fitness Coaching: Where to Start

What makes the best longevity fitness plan? There should be a fine balance between training load, training diversity, recovery, nutrition, and sleep. This is where you come in as a coach. You will find the sweet spot to improve performance while promoting healthy longevity.

There are genetic contributors to longevity that one cannot change. Luckily, the impact of lifestyle factors such as exercise, nutrition, sleep, and stress is also significant. So, there are many things to consider, but this also brings many opportunities to offer unique coaching to clients.

Here are the things you can incorporate in longevity-based coaching:

• Initial assessment: It’s essential to analyze both goals and lifestyle, including the client’s current training, nutrition, sleep, and habits, as these are the main contributors to longevity. The initial assessment helps identify steps to improve the client’s healthy longevity. In this step, you can also suggest tests, which we’ll cover in a moment.
• Holistic approach to fitness: Nutrition and exercise are crucial—there’s no denying that. But they are not the only contributors to longevity. Other factors, such as mental health, sleep, stress, social connections, and environmental influences, affect health and, consequently, longevity. As a coach, having a holistic approach allows you to step back and see the gaps, so you can offer unique help that bridges those gaps.
• Tests and tools: You need personal data to create a longevity-promoting training plan. Tests and tools can help you identify unideal conditions or health problems that hinder health, longevity, and performance. You can find various tests and tools to collect the data you need. Are you trying to understand why a client is feeling fatigued all the time? Offer an at-home sport performance test or analyze the data from their fitness tracker. These can provide data on the client’s sleep, cardiac, metabolic, and respiratory-related metrics. Do you want to see if the training plan improves the client’s biological age? You can suggest a biological age test that shows the rate of aging, so you can objectively see whether the interventions benefit the client. In this case, choosing tests that come with expert reports can be a better choice since evaluating them can require expertise.
• Diversity of Training: Training for healthy longevity and peak performance overlap, but they can also differ. Healthy longevity requires not only a healthy skeletal system but also well-functioning metabolic, cardiovascular, respiratory, cognitive, and reproductive systems. Therefore, it is important to create programs that support all of these systems. This can be achieved through a personalized program that targets aerobic capacity, strength, balance, mobility, functional exercises, agility, and so on.
• Interventions: Besides training, many other science-based longevity interventions can enhance your coaching. You can incorporate various longevity-promoting methods into your practice, including longevity supplements, red light therapy, and cold plunges.
• Teamwork: Fitness is just one contributor to longevity; nutrition, sleep, and stress are important too. Focus on the importance of all contributors. You can collaborate with other professionals since no one knows everything very deeply. This ensures your clients receive the best support in all areas. Let’s say you think that your client’s nutrition needs extra attention. You can refer them to a dietitian who is familiar with your field and understands their needs. This also increases your client’s trust since you’re helping them, even if it is not directly in your interest.

Final Thoughts

Longevity is appealing to every age. We all want to live a healthier, functional, and quality life. With booming longevity awareness and industry growth, this is the time to incorporate longevity into the fitness equation. As a coach, you have the knowledge to guide clients in the best longevity fitness practices. So, what are you waiting for? Start creating your longevity-based fitness groups with the Marketplace by Coach360 today! The Marketplace is for you coaches too: find jobs within studios and access the resource hub for continuing education. With the Marketplace, you can provide premium coaching to your clients and excel in your career on the same platform!

1. What do the terms life expectancy, lifespan, longevity and health span mean? | Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing 
2. Health Benefits of Different Sports: a Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Longitudinal and Intervention Studies Including 2.6 Million Adult Participants 
3. Exercise Sustains the Hallmarks of Health
4. FastStats – Life Expectancy 
5. Training for Longevity: The Reverse J-Curve for Exercise
6. Does Physical Activity Increase Life Expectancy? A Review of the Literature
7. Molecular Mechanisms of Exercise and Healthspan  
8. Sport and Longevity: An Observational Study of International Athletes