The Three Health Foundations

iWellcare Personalized Wellness Empowerment Solutions are based on The Three Foundations to your good health. These include:

• Foundation One: Healthy Nutrition
• Foundation Two: Movement - Consistent Customized Exercise
• Foundation Three: Personal Energy Management (harnessing mental and emotional energy in productive, constructive ways)

Much research in recent years has focused on how each of these foundation areas impacts health quality. Healthy nutrition is paramount in maintaining good health. Movement is essential to joint health, muscle balance and tone, efficient cardiovascular functionality, and metabolic efficiency. Effectively managing and positively channeling emotional and thought energy enables life satisfaction and success.

Below is a discussion of each Foundation, the importance of each, and how they fit into iWellcare programs to help you better understand your body and improve your health.

Foundation One: Balanced Nutrition

Nutrition is a vital to health. Healthy nutrition can decrease risks of heart disease, cancer, stroke, and diabetes and have a positive effect on many other conditions like osteoporosis, hypertension, gastrointestinal issues, gallbladder disease, sleep apnea, respiratory problems, and some cancers. Healthy, balanced eating leads to a longer, fuller and more productive life.

Armed with the right knowledge, you will very quickly see health and weight loss improvements. Our programs teach eating fundamentals that are essential to good health and effective weight loss:

• Macronutrient Fundamentals- understanding how the body uses carbohydrates, proteins and fats and how to combine healthy macronutrients for optimal weight loss.
• Water intake- determining how much you need and finding quality water sources.
• The power of integration- how to combine proper nutrition with a balanced regimen of exercise to achieve lasting results.
• Grocery shopping fundamentals- healthy, cost-effective shopping.
• Recognizing misinformation- developing the education to see through deceptive advertising and make healthy food choices that will last a lifetime.
• How metabolism can be improved through properly balanced caloric intake.
• Understanding organic food.
• Enjoying healthy eating- ideas and recipes that ensure long-term success on a healthy diet.

Foundation Two: Movement

Why Move? Exercise movement when done consistently, helps you build a healthy cardiovascular system, strengthen muscles, tendons and joints, improve metabolism and lose weight, preserve balance in body structure and alignment, maintain high energy levels, prevent chronic disease like diabetes, heart disease and stroke, and maintain a high quality of life into old age.

Exercise must also be designed to meet your body’s needs and your personal goals. iWellcare Personalized Wellness Solutions provide a wealth of exercise knowledge designed to meet your goals and desires for life-long health.

Cardiovascular Exercise

Cardiovascular exercise helps take your health and well-being to a higher level!

Many adaptations occur in your body in response to cardiovascular exercise:

• Weight loss: Cardiovascular exercise is a valuable component of your weight loss program when correctly performed.
• Boost metabolism
• Maintain healthy joints
• Decreased resting heart rate and lowered blood pressure.
• Increase in capillary numbers that supply muscle fibers from a normal 4.4 capillaries per muscle fiber to about 5.9 capillaries, improving your body’s oxygen efficiency.
• Expansion in the size of the heart chamber and increased blood volume pumped per heart beat.
• Total blood volume and hemoglobin numbers are enhanced. Exercise leads to larger size and numbers of mitochondria in muscle fibers and increased myoglobin numbers (myoglobin is a molecule that carries oxygen to mitochondria, the “powerhouse” of the cell, where nutrients are converted into ATP to fuel cellular activities).

Cardiovascular exercise is also a valuable component of your weight loss program. It will condition your body for other fitness activities, help you maintain healthy joints, and boost metabolism.

We teach you step-by-step how to:

• How to optimally achieve fat loss
• How to determine the best routine to help you accomplish your fitness and weight loss goals.
• How to properly progress your cardio routine over time.
• How to monitor heart rate and exercise intensity
• Cardio methods and their benefits
  
  

Stretching that Enables Balanced Joint Stability and Mobility

One of the great benefits of exercise is its impact on joints. There is a common saying “Motion is Lotion” and this is particularly true when it comes to the spine and other joints in your body. Many joint injuries stem from inactivity and under-use. Movement is requisite to healthy joint maintenance.

When a joint is moved, synovial fluid, which acts as a lubricant, is pushed into the joint. Synovial fluid eases joint movement and plays an important role in maintaining joint health. Movement is required to push synovial fluid into the joint.

Exercise movement enables lubrication, improves joint function, and will ultimately help you maintain a healthy joint over the course of your life.

The right stretch program will help decrease joint injury risk. Many people experience decrease in back pain, knee, hip and other joint pain when beginning a consistent exercise program that includes stretching. The key in designing your stretch regimen is customization to balance your joint stability with joint mobility. iWellcare professionals will show you how to do this.
There are several stretch tools we empower you with:

• Active Mobility Stretching: moving joints through their natural range of motion in a non-forceful manner. Mobility stretching decompresses joints, enhances synovial fluid flow, breaks up adhesions and calcium deposits in joints, and enables pain-free movement.
• SMR (Self-Myofascial Release) Stretching: SMR stretching involves use of foam rollers and other tools to open fascia in and around muscles. Fascia provides the supporting network for your body frame. SMR stretching helps mold this myofascial framework to help you achieve and retain your body’s optimum structural balance.
• Passive/Static Stretching: Static stretching is designed to improve flexibility. Once you know your body’s flexibility needs, static stretching can be a useful part of your routine.
• PNF Stretch (Proprioceptive Neuromuscular Facilitation) or “Contract Relax Stretching”: PNF stretching is a great tool for coaxing stubborn areas of the body into a deeper stretch, enhancing flexibility and mobility. PNF can be particularly valuable in muscles that are contributing to structural imbalances that could ultimately lead to injury.
• Training in regimens including yoga and Pilates and how these can be beneficial to you.

Receive the essential coaching that will enable you to create and maintain a stretch program that fits your personal body structure needs- an education that will empower you for the rest of your life.


Customized Strength Exercise

Strength building exercise yields a substantial benefit for fat loss. As you tone muscles, your body becomes much more efficient in burning calories and fat. Resistance exercise is an essential part of any fat loss program.

Strength exercise involves challenging muscles against resistance. Body weight, stretch bands, and weight lifting equipment can all be used to create resistance to challenge muscles.

Resistance exercise has many benefits. It enhances tissue resilience. Tendons and ligaments respond with an increased ability to withstand loads placed upon them. Bones respond with an increase in density, beneficial in preventing osteoporosis. Muscle fibers enlarge (hypertrophy), allowing greater strength capacity and improved metabolism.

A properly balanced strength-training program helps you maintain healthy joints. Myofascial imbalance in the body, often resulting from sedentary lifestyle and sit-down work can negatively impact joint alignment. Such imbalance contributes to low-back pain, neck and shoulder discomfort, knee and hip dysfunction, and other joint pain.

iWellcare takes a very specialized approach in analyzing posture, performing a functional movement screen, performing strength and flexibility testing to determining how your muscle imbalances may be contributing to joint or other pain. You will receive expert assistance in creating an effective strength-exercise and stretching program to correct these imbalances, align body structure, improve movement patterns, and achieve your fitness goals.

Foundation Three: Personal Energy Management

At iWellcare we use the term “Personal Energy Management” to describe the pro-active process for balancing thought and emotion. Managing “personal energy” goes beyond dealing with stress or managing time. Effective emotional energy management means positive self-management. It involves a concern and caring for self that facilitates self-esteem building and positive goal achievement. Managing one’s person is essential in achieving long-lasting health and living a productive, fulfilling life.

Homeostasis

The human body is resilient to stress. When healthy, your body effectively regulates its internal environment to maintain a balanced, stable condition of biological homeostasis. Disease and injury are the result of homeostatic imbalance.

How we think effects our body in profound ways. The quality of your thoughts can effectively maintain homeostasis, or result in imbalance leading to injury and disease.

Ever notice when you are stressed emotionally you may get a cold or flu, or you resort to unhealthy “comfort foods”? Through a complex interplay between the nervous and endocrine systems, neuromuscular system, and cardiovascular and other body systems, your thoughts impact complex chains of events that enable homeostasis.

How you think can stimulate release of hormones in the body, affect changes to the cardiovascular and neuromuscular systems, impact sleep quality, result in muscle contractions and tension, and have a profound effect on immune function.

Thought can lead to illness and injury, or it can enable constructive, healthy balance.The wayyou think gives you the capacity to maintain a healthy lifestyle of excellent nutrition and exercise and achieve empowering goals, or it can lead to emotional stress, distress to the body, and lack of lifestyle change success.

By effectively managing our thoughts, we gain greater control over our physical health.

Programming

We all have different ways of looking at the world and interpreting what is around us based on many factors. Family, religious upbringing, friends, school, culture, and government all play a role in programming, or shaping our perceptions. In many cases these personal perceptions are self-limiting and debilitating, and make positive, disease preventive lifestyle change extremely difficult.
Positive mental programming leads to desirable results, towards greater awareness of one’s body and surroundings, and empowerment to achieve healthy goals. Our personalized wellness empowerment solutions teach you step by step the nuts and bolts of positive programming, goal setting, and habit change, facilitating your success.

Your powerful mind can lead you to empowering change!

Find out how iWellcare Health Empowerment Seminars empower you with the tools to effectively apply the Three Health Foundations to your life and enjoy a lifelong health benefit.