Introducing Viavi Health Strategy and their Keys to Healthy Ageing

As part of our Membership Collective at Blend Group, we have a collection of several partners who form an exclusive group of like-minded individuals and organisations who offer various services that we feel are especially valuable to our membership platform. One of these unique partners is Viavi Health Strategy, a world leader in health assessment and strategy services, that’s focused on ensuring its clients are the healthiest they can be.

One key area that Viavi has identified in ensuring the health and wellbeing of its clients is healthy ageing – in other words, slowing down the physical and mental ageing of your body and mind. Viavi states that there’s an overwhelming amount of research confirming exactly what the key strategies are to achieve this, so we thought we’d share some of them with you here.

1. Strength Training

Viavi says that studies repeatedly show a close association between how strong you are and how long you live. Simply put, this is because muscle tissue is a major consumer of glucose (blood sugar), meaning the more muscle mass an individual has, the more effective their body is at coping with the surge of glucose into the blood after high carbohydrate meals. Over time, this helps fight issues such as inflammation, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer and Alzheimer’s. Strength training helps to maintain an optimal body fat percentage, increases bone strength and reduces the risk of falls and fractures. It also helps to improve cognitive performance, all contributing to keeping you healthy.

2. Stress resilience

Our current fast-paced lifestyles unfortunately often result in raised levels of the stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline, as well as a nervous system that can remain stuck in ‘fight or flight’ mode. Whilst this can be beneficial to deal with short-term stressors, long-term stress is disastrous for healthy ageing. The key strategies to help improve our resilience to stress include transcendental or mindfulness-based meditation, deep breathing exercises, yoga, tai chi and cardiovascular exercise.

3. Sleep quality

Getting 7-8 hours of quality sleep each night is arguably one of the most important things we can do to slow down ageing and protect our brains. Poor sleep not only affects energy levels, productivity, and motivation, but it’s directly linked to weight gain, Alzheimer’s, type 2 diabetes and cancer. There are several easy-to-implement strategies to help improve your sleep quality, including aiming to wake up at the same time every day, avoiding caffeine from mid-afternoon onwards and switching off from work and screen use two hours before going to sleep.

4. Have a purpose in older age

One thing in common that most centenarians (individuals aged 100 and over) around the world have is they all still play an important role in society and family life, even into old age. Whether it’s having hobbies, looking after grandchildren, being an active member of the community or volunteering, a sense of purpose in old age is vitally important for happiness, brain health and balancing stress hormones.

Hopefully, our health partners at Viavi have demonstrated that it is possible to fight the signs of ageing and stay healthy as you get older in a proactive manner that’s within our control. Please get in touch with us here should you wish to speak with Viavi about creating your own health strategy plan, so you can stay as healthy as possible for as long as possible. We’d love to put you in touch.