The Healthly Value of a Health Club Membership
Some people get it right away and other come to know it. Some people desire it and search for the way to get it. Some people look into the future and see the benefits and others look back to the past and say what would be different today if I had it back then.
What is it? It is the power and wonderful feeling of exercise in an environment that it encouraging, challenging, exciting and rewarding. We all need to move and many times today it seems the basic problem is the lack of movement in our lives. Using all the conveniences around us today the simplest act of walking is pushed aside by the need to get somewhere quicker and faster than we did the previous day.
Prioritizing our weekly appointments with ourselves or even better with friends at Universal is a perfect way to fight the easy ones; lack of energy, no time for me, and stress reduction. More importantly the big ones are combated in your workout time. Heart disease is now responsible for 27% of the deaths in the U.S., Diabetes and High cholesterol is responsible for stealing the health of hundreds of thousands of members of our community. Arthritis suffers find relief from the pain by participation in regular movement, whether that is on land or in the warm smoothing therapy pool. How about reducing the chance of developing Alzheimer’s disease by 40% due to exercising just 15 minutes at day three times per week? The basic fact is that exercise is key to a healthy and better lifestyle. Without our health nothing else will matter much.
All this translate in to higher costs for health care for both you and the employers out there that are finding it harder and harder to keep this benefit viable in your employment package.
The good news is that we can all do something about this, by exercising regularly and inviting our friends and family to join us we can make a difference. The latest statistics* state that exercise reduces heart disease by 27 to 41%.
When we take all this in to account what is the value of membership in a health club. The cost of membership is a likely a tenth of your health care cost, less than many other things we spend money on like dining out ( likely eating less healthy than needed). We will put forth month hundreds of dollars to drive a car that is much more than we need, but sometimes struggle with justifying the cost of our gym membership. Honestly, if you don’t use it on a regular basis your thinking is understandable. So why not step back in the ring get yourself a new workout program, try something new at the club so that you can identify that combination that will bring you lifelong success and avoiding the pain that will come as a result of inactivity.
Deaths/Mortality
Number of deaths: 2,448,017
Death rate: 825.9 deaths per 100,000 population
Life expectancy: 77.8 years
Infant Mortality rate: 6.87 deaths per 1,000 live births
Number of deaths for leading causes of death:
Heart disease: 652,091
Cancer: 559,312
Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 143,579
Chronic lower respiratory diseases:130,933
Accidents (unintentional injuries): 117,809
Diabetes: 75,119
Alzheimer’s disease: 71,599
Influenza/Pneumonia: 63,001
Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 43,901
Septicemia: 34,136
Source: Deaths: Final Data for 2005, Tables C, 7, 30 PDF 808 KB
*In a recent article published in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association, researchers from Harvard Medical School released data from the 10-year Women’s Health Study that showed moderate exercise reduced the risk of heart disease by 27 percent to 41 percent. The study was performed on 27,055 participants, all of whom were women working in health care who, between 1995 and 1999, were free of either cancer or any evidence of heart disease. During the 10 years, 979 of the women developed heart problems. Of these, 253 had an acute heart attack, 398 had angioplasties and 219 were treated with coronary artery bypass surgery.
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