Adding life to years
Text size:
-+=

Promoting health through “Chokin Exercise” (muscle strengthening exercise)


Promoting health through “Chokin Exercise” (muscle strengthening exercise)

Summary

Hayama Town has been promoting the “Chokin Exercise” (a type of muscle strengthening exercise) town-wide since 2016. Currently, this exercise programme is being held in 15 locations, helping to widen a community network among older residents.

The “Chokin Exercise” does not require any equipment, so anyone can practice it easily, even at home. Nevertheless, the “Chokin Exercise” has been scientifically proven to have a certain level of effectiveness in improving muscle strength. Older people get together once a week to perform the “Chokin Exercise” while singing its theme song, and they also practice at home during the rest of the week.

The aims of “Chokin Exercise” are to create a community network and to reduce older residents’ care-dependency. “Chokin exercise” not only maintains their health, but also improves their ME-BYO status. “ME-BYO” is a concept which does not consider health and sickness as two clearly separable conditions. Rather, the physical and mental condition is deemed to be continuously changing between health and sickness, and “ME-BYO” is the concept that covers the entire process of this change.

The programme has received many happy comments from older participants such as “I now trip less frequently” or “Weeding my garden is much less tiring now.” Through the “Chokin Exercise” programme, we are building a community where people support each other and can live actively as they age.

Key facts

Main target group: Older people in general

Sector(s): Health

Desired outcome for older people:
Build and maintain relationships

Contact details

Name: Satoru Owatari

Email address: kaigo-fukusi@hayama.kanagawa.jp


Age-friendly practice in detail (click to expand):

Engaging the wider community

Project lead: Civil Society Organisation

Others involved in the project:
  • Local authorities

Older people’s involvement: Older people helped to implement the age-friendly practice

Moving forward

Has the impact of this age-friendly practice been analysed: Yes

Was the impact positive or negative:
Positive

Looking back

Challenges:
Since our programmes expanded in our community faster than we had scheduled, we needed to provide extra budget to the programme to support its expansion.