Last week Firstbeat hosted a couple of international events in
Helsinki. First, a group of our partners from 9 different countries and
all the way from Brazil gathered together for our annual meeting and the
next day, about 100 people attended a seminar “Getting the Balance
Right 2”, with expert speakers from around Finland and Europe.
Participants came from more than 10 countries, providing a lot of good
discussions and networking opportunities. It’s always beneficial to hear
and share views from different places, both to highlight the
similarities and learn to appreciate cultural differences.
Partner meeting
This was already the 3rd annual meeting of the international Firstbeat
team! New features and user tips in both sports and lifestyle were
shared, and during a workshop exercise, the focus was on the key topics
and needs of product development, sales, marketing and lifestyle
assessment operations of each partner. Discussions together as a group
and individually keep us all on the same page, bring out different
viewpoints and help us become a truly international company! After a
long productive day of meetings, most of us got together for a run
around Seurasaari – in shorts or jeans if running gear had been left
behind! Various levels of EPOC and training effect was accumulated and
the run was followed by sauna, avanto (‘a hole in the ice’) by a few and
a delicious dinner of Finnish delicacies at restaurant Lappi. So busy
was the day – and so hard was it to get a few people out of the sauna! –
that we even forgot to take a proper team photo.
Seminar
Getting the Balance Right 2 -seminar was held the next day and our
international Firstbeat group was joined by a large group of
participants from around Finland and a few additional countries, with
representatives from occupational healthcare, private well-being /
coaching companies, research, human resources etc. Most of the
presentations are available on our website, so I’ll just focus on some
highlights and interesting picks here.
Simon Shepard’s (Optima-Life)
presentation discussed global trends in well-being and performance,
with interesting results from lifestyle projects conducted in the UK. A
very thought-provoking part was this ancient quote from Plato: “Lack
of activity destroys the good condition of every human being, while
movement and methodical physical exercise save it and preserve it“.
A strangely familiar problem still today! Just consider recent
publicity about the harms of sitting too much… How little has man has
learned over centuries!
KIHU’s Esa
Hynynen shared some results from the world of elite sports, where the
balance between the right amount of stress (overall load) and recovery
is of crucial importance for top performance. His final slide showed the
word Stressed … (read backwards) = Desserts! The
point being that in our effort to find the right balance, whether we are
athletes or ‘regular’ people, we need to take good care of ourselves,
and sometimes that means enjoying ‘the good things’, in appropriate
dosages!
Susan Kallio from Diacor emphasized
the importance of personal feedback and reflection to help people make
appropriate micro decisions to improve their lifestyle and Harri
Lindholm from the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health took
us beneath the surface to show some results of stress measurement
studies in different occupational groups. Firstbeat’s presentation
shared some experiences in conducting the Lifestyle assessment to large
groups around the world and showed a few practical examples about how to
make the process easier and more scalable.
In a potpourri of experiences from other countries, Gergely Vada from Fusion Vital raised
an important policy-level topic that has come up in Finnish companies
too: the need for 50-minute meetings. When meetings are scheduled for a
full hour, people constantly have a feeling of being behind and this
poses a challenge when trying to learn to manage our days better. Ole
Petersen presented the Fitimjob Energy assessment model with a nice scale for interpreting the results (to replace the more boring good – moderate – bad): Balanced – Stretched – Struggling. Jarle Holt from Segmentor AS showed
examples of top Norwegian athletes who utilize Firstbeat’s recovery
analysis in their training – and reminded about the similarities – and
lessons to learn – between athletes and regular people.
The day ended with Ilkka Korhonen from Tampere University of Technology talking
about using new technologies to change bad population behaviors that
are basically killing us – and about how to translate understanding into
action and concrete behavior.
His presentation was followed by a panel discussion, where
Firstbeat’s CEO Joni Kettunen prompted experts from several countries to
discuss corporate needs for wellness programs. The audience had a lot
of questions and in retrospect, we should have allowed more time for
this very valuable exchange of ideas! One of the issues was the concept
of stress: why we use such a negative word and how can we turn the
attention to the positive. Several excellent concepts and terms were
raised, for example performance and productivity as the focus of the
assessment and capacity to face challenges, alertness and impact of life
as actual synonyms for stress. In the end, it’s probably not the word
itself, but how we package the product and make sure the right message
gets promoted: Getting the balance right and encouraging people to
tackle their lifestyle in a positive way!
Thank you everyone and see you next time!
See the seminar presentations here
Writer:
Tiina Hoffman,
M.Sc., Exercise Physiologist, Wellness Specialist
FirstbeatLabels: Firstbeat team, Getting the Balance Right, KIHU, Optima-Life, Tiina Hoffman