Scott Kashman is a hospital administrator, so he has to confront issues of health and wellness every day—and the costs we incur by not paying more attention to them.
“There is no question that healthier living will help us achieve better outcomes even beyond health-care coverage,” said Kashman, CEO at St. Joseph Medical Center and one of two Fittest Execs contestants with a perfect actual score of 150 on the final fitness appraisal. “The reality is, people who eat healthier and work out regularly will have improved energy levels, feel better about themselves and their workplace and in turn provide a better service to their respective organizations.”
But how effective can a wellness program like Fittest Execs really be? Can you really move the needle significantly, even over short time spans? Look inside the numbers generated by the 103 contestants who finished the post-competition assessments in the inaugural Fittest Execs and Companies Challenge for some clues:
• 73 percent of those tested lost weight or, perhaps as impressively, gained no weight whatsoever through the holidays.
• The weight-loss group combined to shed approximately 500 pounds.
• Proving that weight isn’t everything, two members of the Shook Hardy & Bacon team put on weight but still raised their fitness scores— and improved their Body Mass Index ratings, to boot. The reason? They added more muscle mass.
• 40 percent of those tested decreased their cholesterol readings—admittedly, a transient reading that fluctuates hour to hour—by an average of more than 8 points each.
• 83 percent improved their leg strength, in some cases by startling amounts. The biggest winner there was Dan Westhoff, competing as an individual contestant, who more than tripled his leg strength for a single repetition, lifting 586 pounds after an initial lift of 186.
• 77 percent improved their chest press. The biggest straight-poundage improvement went to Randy Brown of Hoefer Wysocki Architects’ Team No. 2. He added 118 pounds to his single repetition lift.
• 50 percent improved their aerobic capacity, with Bart Walker of Bart’s Electric adding 24.9 points to his VO2 Max score.
• 62 percent reduced their Body Mass Index. The going-away winner there was Katie Kinder of the YMCA, whose BMI fell by 10.2 percentage points in a metric where even 2-3 points is considered a strong shift.
• Perhaps most impressively, of the teams that finished with at least four competing members, all but one team reduced their average combined score, in some cases, by double-digit margins.
Beyond specific numbers, though, the Fittest Exec and Companies Challenge brought into sharp relief a couple of important intangibles, said Heidi Campain, a fitness expert who served as project coordinator for the Jewish Community Center.
“I think the behavioral changes people made can’t always be determined by reading data—the personal stories and listening to what people actually were doing to change their lifestyle,” she said. “With the categories in testing we did, we can make a very good assumption on health status and what needed to be done to decrease your chances of chronic disease in the long run. There is always going to be something more specific or diagnostic, but to look at primary prevention, we really looked at a great range of categories.”
More important, as a foundation of any successful corporate wellness program, she said, was the value of having attainable targets.
“One of the biggest conclusions I found through this contest is people are very motivated by goals,” she said. “The Fittest Execs program provided these people with a specific goal to improve their fitness and health within three months. They were very excited to get started and to learn more about what they could do to improve their health.”
And for the most part, they stuck with it. From a field of 130 initial contestants, 103 showed up for final health assessments, Others dropped out along the way because of surgeries [planned and unplanned], personal scheduling conflicts or leaving their jobs with host companies.
But even those who fell short of their goals became more aware of their exercise and diet choices—“behavior that will benefit them in the long run,” as Campain said.
One final result of Fittest Execs is yet to be measured: The exact impact it will have for companies who can demonstrate to insurers that their work-force health is trending up. The prospects for that, though, are promising: As Dorothy Cobb of the Athletic Rehabilitation Center observed, “for others to see the enthusiasm and true commitment of our executive team in making significant changes within their own lives only increased the awareness and focus on wellness throughout our company.”
Executives at Athletic Rehab, she said, understand how important wellness can be for a company’s bottom line. “Our wellness program allowed us to save $27,000 last year alone in health-care premium costs and we did this with a fairly young and healthy work force.”
Moreover, she noted, there is a hidden cost to companies that comes from an inactive or unhealthy group of em-ployees, with musculoskeletal pain and injuries affecting work performance. Fittest Execs, she said, can help address those issues, as well, by driving better health from the executive suite.
“We love the idea of a top-down emphasis on fitness,” Cobb said, “and we encourage more companies to take a closer look at the benefits of a wellness program.” 