Men's Health Overview

Hello, everybody. My name is Andrew Aroustian, and I'm so excited to be bringing you the Reach Men's Health Program preview. In this preview, I will be taking you through some mat work and reformer classes that will give you an insight into some of the concepts and principles that we include within the Reach Men's Health programs. It has been widely publicized that physical activity is vital for health and wellbeing, and this is true for both men and women. In the Reach Men's Health program, we have designed these programs to specifically targeted men that promote healthy movement patterns that address the busy lifestyle conditioning that men face.

We'll also look at the behavioral aspects of health in men, what motivates men to exercise, and also what are the barriers that men face in not only health but in their health-promoting behaviors. According to the World Health Organization, the number one killer of people in the world is cardiovascular disease. The most important behavioral risk factors, and these are modifiable risk factors as well to cardiovascular disease, is an unhealthy diet and lack of physical exercise and activity. This is where we come in. The Reach Men's Health program has been designed specifically for men to target and address the needs of men throughout the entire lifespan.

So we believe that getting in there early and targeting these movement sequences at an early age and throughout the lifespan is vital for a long, strong, healthy life. Not only do we look at the physical challenges or adaptations that men face within their life, we also look at those behavioral aspects of what motivates men to exercise, what motivates men to come to your classes, what keeps them there? How can we as teachers use our queuing and programming to build that intrinsic motivation within men to continue coming back and moving their bodies more regularly. Mental health is a huge issue that men face at the moment, and anxiety and depression is very common and prevalent in our society today, and it's been shown that movement and physical activity really help to reduce anxiety and depression in all people, especially men. In Australia, there was a study done and they took 13,500 men from the Australian Longitudinal Men's Health Survey and looked at the effects of exercise on mental health and anxiety and depression.

And what this study found is these 13,500 men, that's a lot of men, who took this study showed that men that participated in exercise for approximal, well, actually at 150 minutes a week of exercise showed lower odds of developing moderate to severe depression. Intensity and duration also have been shown to reduce the prevalence of depression in males in this particular survey, and also increase health outcomes. In the following mat work and reformer classes, I will be presenting movement sequences that I've worked with my male clients back home and with great success. You will no doubt recognize some of this repertoire, and, you know, that's the beauty of these programs is that we haven't reinvented the wheel. We've just created these sequences and these variations that the programming and the sequencing, the way that we've put them together really makes all the difference.

There are three sections to each of the program. The first section is the body prep and that's exactly as the name implies. We want to prep the body here, so this is going to be a little bit more of a global muscular activation than you're probably used to within your usual warmups. What we wanna do is build that hormonal stimulation right from the get-go and build that entire, whole cardiovascular system get that working to start with while still at the same time mobilizing, activating, and really getting that body ready to move. The second part of the program is called integrated training.

So this is a great section here where we start to use our repertoire to build a more whole body activation and boost cellular respiration. So here what we're doing is we're boosting those energy production right into at a cellular level. Staying in the whole body, this brings us into a heart-strengthening, testosterone-boosting mode. This will include differing variant levels of coordination, balance, bit of endurance control while at the same time still addressing those postural exercises that we need to improve that posture and just to decrease that compression into the spine and organs. Balancing movement sequences with elements of power, endurance control, and isometric strength should help increase strength and power more efficiently.

This category really highlights integrated training and the importance of full-body integration in the process of increasing cardiovascular strength and endurance. The final category of the program is called the functional stretch, and this is where we have an opportunity to lengthen and stretch the musculature and the joint in a way that's been designed specifically for the male physiology. You'll see that it's kept simple and accessible and it's conserved as not only a warm-down but a really much needed opportunity to stretch and lengthen those muscles, especially in towards the low back and hip area. Overall, these programs will give you a 30-minute introduction into how we can design our programs specifically for men and their health needs. Thank you for joining me, and I look forward to sharing these programs with you really soon.