Exercise Coaching for Seniors: Collaborating with Nurses for Effective Regimens

Whether you are a friend, family member, or an exercise science professional, if you hold a caretaker role for a senior-aged individual, chances are good that you’ll want or need to help provide some form of exercise regimen as part of his or her care. Exercise can be a vital activity for seniors and create a host of important health benefits.

However, for most seniors, exercise needs to be approached creatively and intentionally to make sure they are staying safe and healthy while engaging in exercise. Designing exercise plans for seniors can often be highly individualized. It needs to be done with the input of multiple health professionals when possible, to make sure the regimen that’s created only aids (rather than compromises) any other treatment programs or health concerns that the senior may have.

Nurses who have treated or are treating that individual can be vital resources for creating effective, safe exercise plans for seniors.

Why Exercise Is Important for Senior-Aged Individuals

There are a number of reasons that exercise can be highly beneficial for seniors and should be incorporated into a senior adult’s care plan whenever possible, even when highly adapted for limited mobility or health risks. Exercise can create a number of valuable benefits for seniors:

Physical Health Improvement: Engaging with forms of physical exercise can create useful benefits for everyone. Some of these can be particularly useful for seniors. When done correctly, exercise regimens can help build or restore strength, balance, and flexibility. These skills can help seniors avoid falls and recover faster if they do experience injuries.

Contributions to Mental Health: Exercise can help enable better quality sleep, and release hormones that improve mood. It also involves learning and practicing new skills, which can help reduce the risk of Alzheimer's and other cognitive deteriorations in seniors.

Preventative Health Benefits: Exercise can assist in keeping dangerous health conditions like heart disease, diabetes, and arthritis at bay.

Source of Social Relationships: Whether with a trainer, a therapist, or in an exercise class with a coach and other participants, seniors that exercise with others benefit not only from the movement and activity but from the socialization of being engaged with other people in the process.

How Nurses Can Play a Vital Role in Building Exercise Care Plans

Exercise routines must be implemented carefully for seniors. Because of the specific and often acute physical needs or limitations seniors can experience due to age and health factors, some forms of exercise would be inappropriate or even dangerous for seniors. This is why engaging other medical care professionals in the exercise plan design process is so important. Nurses that work with seniors can be huge assets to the exercise regimen design process.

Part of a nurse’s role is to advocate for correct and reasonable care for his or her patients. Nurses that work with seniors have in-depth knowledge about their specific health metrics and conditions. If a senior is taking blood thinners or broke his or her leg last year, his or her nurse practitioner will know those details and be able to provide important information about how those health concerns should affect any plans for exercise.

Collaborating with nursing professionals can help ensure that any exercise plan designed for a senior will remain safe and appropriate.

Tips for Collaborating with Nurses to Create Exercise Regimens

To make effective collaboration happen, it’s important to follow a few steps that can help you navigate the process efficiently.

Identify Important Goals

Exercise can accomplish a wide number of benefits. However, not all of them are useful for everyone at any given time. It’s important to start with a clear idea of what will actually help the individual at hand. A senior that is struggling to ingest enough categories and is below recommended body weight should obviously not be assigned an exercise plan designed for weight loss.

A plan to increase joint strength and balance will look much different from a plan designed to help strengthen the core and relieve back pain. Starting the process by getting a clear idea of the end line is the best way to create an exercise plan that’s both effective and safe.

Establish Regular Communication with the Senior’s Nursing Staff

To collaborate effectively, you must have open lines of communication with the nurse or nurses that work with the senior in question. Make contact by phone or in person. Share your planned regimen to get thoughts and feedback. Ask how you can support their goals or current work with the senior to help aid any other medical treatment plans currently being enacted.

And strategize how you will share information and updates between you to keep each other apprised. These acts can make it much easier to create an effective plan and will make it more likely that the plan is followed.

Support Implementation

Once the exercise plan has been finalized (including details such as when sessions will take place, how often during the week your senior will engage with the plan, and a strategy for regular evaluation to check progress), it’s important to follow through and support its use. If you plan to be at sessions, make sure you attend and communicate well in advance if you are going to be late or unable to get to a session. This will communicate to the senior that you are treating the regimen seriously.

Evaluate the Regimen Early and Often

Evaluation is a huge part of the exercise process. Without implementing a way of tracking any changes or progress, you won’t know whether the exercise plan is proving effective. This usually looks like taking baseline measurements or assessments before the exercise plan begins, and then measuring those same metrics at regular intervals (for example, every 4, 8, or 12 weeks) to assess changes or improvement.

These evaluations should be shared with nurses or nursing staff so that they can update other health treatment plans correspondingly.

By involving nurses in exercise regimen design and implementation, you can ensure higher levels of safety and effectiveness.