Well-being and lifestyle topics have people buzzing around Europe!

Guest Author

In 2011-2012, Firstbeat took and is taking major steps in going international in the health and well-being sector by conducting lifestyle assessment projects and arranging training seminars in several European countries. We now have partners in UK, France, Sweden, Hungary, Spain, Switzerland, Germany, Denmark and Norway. In March we arranged, together with our UK partner Optima-Life, the first international Firstbeat HEALTH seminar in London. All our European partners were there, as well as about 40 people from the UK health, wellness and corporate sector. Presentation topics ranged from a Cricket case study to Recovering to win to Examples and cases of how Firstbeat analyses have been used in health management and lifestyle guidance. The seminar was a real success and it was great to see people from around Europe conversing about the same familiar topics that we have been working with for years here at Firstbeat.

Also in March, we did a project with a large multinational company. Bodyguards were shipped back and forth to different countries and 20 people took part in a 3-day Lifestyle Assessment. 2 Firstbeat specialists travelled to Germany to provide a group feedback session and hold individual discussions with each participant. The project was well received by management and individual participants and will hopefully continue in the fall.

During these international projects, it became clear that people everywhere are dealing with the same topics. Workdays easily stretch into the wee hours, e-mails buzz into communicators when we are supposed to be on leisure time, work pressures creep into our sleep – and then there’s the non-work life to deal with: how to balance spouse time, kid time, housework time, own time… Surely there are also some differences between countries and cultures (and that will be an interesting area to learn more about!) , but the bottom line seems to be very similar: people are struggling to find the right balance between the multitude of demands in their lives and are welcoming tools that make finding this balance a bit easier. The familiar Firstbeat graphs – seeing how much red, green and blue (stress, recovery and physical activity) there is in our days – have people buzzing around Europe!

Guest Author

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