In The Press: Wellness Warriors

Auriens offers a cutting edge wellness programme for its older residents. What can we learn from it?

Want to get in the best shape of your life? There's no better place to look for inspiration than Auriens, the luxury living destination where residents benefit from a cutting edge health and fitness programme. Director or wellness Gideon remfry has been called one of the top 25 trainers in the world by Men's Fitness, with clients including Shane McGuigan, Adele, Kylie Minogue and Ethan Hawke. He shares his insights.

How does working with 65+ years olds compare to working with athletes? Working with a 65+ year old and working with an athlete is no fundamentally that different. Performance is performance, whether you just want to get out a chair or run faster and further. We uniquely model performance for whoever is sitting in front of us, using many of the same basic principles, just adjusted for the individual. 

I've working with athletes and celebrities but I think my clients at Auriens are actually more compelling as a cohort, because the work we do with them really radically changes their life outside the gym. 

Talk us through the wellness journey of someone at Auriens. It starts with a wellness assessment, looking at things like lifestyle, sleep, diet, medication, medical history and the goals of the client. We take bloods on site, and the results come through within 10 to 15 minutes. That really gives us a sense of where the client is, and how their lifestyle is affecting them — we call it our cellular stress test. We measure body composition with a medical grade body composition analyser, which tells us how much body fat they're keeping on them, and how much visceral fat have have internally.

Using all of that information, we out together a six week programme. This includes training sessions, massage, manual lymphatic drainage and reflexology. These are very personalised programmes — they can be adapted to people who are immobile or post-op.

What kind of results have you seen? We have seen huge improvement across a number of markers. Residents have seen a 40% reduction in cellular stress, an 80% reductions in visceral fat, and a 64% increase in skeletal mass. The people we work with are healthier and happier, and they make friends too as part of our group classes. 

How can we improve our fitness, even if we don't have access to the Auriens facilities? We're doing some very cool stuff at Auriens, but really, the basicas are pretty simple. A lot of people think there's no possibility of change. I think exercise is probably one of the most powerful medications in the world. The outcomes on longevity are profound. What we know is when people stop moving, they decline very rapidly — both physcially and metally. The very basics of exercise, just moving daily, doing the shopping, gardening, are findametally important. If you lose the reason to do that, make one! Get a dog, or if you're retired or work from home. try a 'fake commute' — even if that's just getting dressed and walking around the block before sitting down to work. 

How about diet? What's lesser known is that the older we get, the more protein we require. I think trying to achieve about 1.2 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight is ideal — and what that means is having a good portion of protein every meal, three times a day. If that's tricky, you can get high protein yoghurt pots that can help with that, or you can add an egg or nuts to your breakfast of lunch.

Has working at Auriens changed your approach to wellness? Yes! Now when anyone talks to me who's under 50 and says 'I can't put on muscle', I start laughing. In this job I'm regularly seeing people who are over 80 putting on half a kilo of muscle in six to eight weeks. There's some amazing research out there. Biobank did a study on changing your lifestyle at 60+, and you can put ten years on your life with some fairly simple changes to your exercise and nutrition. Resistance traiing can not just help you get stronger and build more muscle, but it can also reduce perceived stress, pain, and a lot of other markets associated with ageing. It's never too late to invest in your health!In this exclusive interview, Gideon shares why working with older adults is not only inspiring, but often more life-changing than training celebrities or athletes.