What’s Included in Tidal Health’s Cincinnati Healthspan Program (and What We Deliberately Left Out)
A good way to understand any program is to look at what it chose not to be.
Most health and wellness offerings get built by starting with what to include. We did the opposite. Before we ever decided what our healthspan program at Anchor Wellness Center in Kenwood would do, we spent a long time deciding what it wouldn’t because the exclusions are what keep a program honest. Here’s what we ruled out, and why, followed by exactly what’s left once you take those things away.
Tidal Health isn’t primary care
If you have an acute issue, a fever, an injury, something that needs a diagnosis today, your primary care physician or urgent care is still the right first call. Tidal Health isn’t built to replace that relationship, and it never will be. It’s built for the years-long stretch before and after those moments: the long, quiet middle where nothing is technically wrong yet, but nothing is being actively managed either. That stretch is where most of a person’s healthspan is actually won or lost, and it’s the part the traditional system has the least infrastructure for.
Tidal Health isn’t insurance-billed
Insurance reimburses the treatment of diagnosed conditions. That’s the whole model: a code gets entered, a diagnosis justifies it, a claim gets paid. Comprehensive biomarker panels, VO2 max testing, and quarterly performance reassessment for someone who isn’t sick simply don’t fit inside that structure. We could have tried to force them in anyway, but that would have meant designing the program around disease in order to make it billable — which defeats the entire point of building something proactive in the first place.
So Tidal Health is private-pay functional medicine. That’s not a workaround; it’s what makes the rest of the program possible. It’s the only thing that lets us do quarterly, in-person, individualized reassessment instead of a templated protocol that has to justify itself to a payer instead of to your actual data.
It isn’t a gym membership wearing a health label
Strength and conditioning is a real, central part of Tidal Health and our partner Driven Performance builds and runs that piece. But there’s a meaningful difference between a program built around your specific baseline data and a class schedule built to fit as many people as possible into the same hour. Every plan Driven Performance builds starts from what your Inside View and Outside View assessments actually showed: your biomarkers, your movement screening, your VO2 max, your grip strength, your force plate results. Nobody gets handed a generic program and told to make it work.
It isn’t a longevity or anti-aging program
We’re not chasing a number on an actuarial table, and we’re openly skeptical of anything that promises to add years to your life without being able to say much about what those years will actually look like. That’s the difference between a lifespan program and a healthspan program. Tidal Health is built entirely around the second one: more years spent capable, present, and doing the things you actually love, not simply more years on the calendar.
What Tidal Health does include
Once you take out primary care, insurance billing, a generic gym membership, and an actuarial promise, here’s what’s left:
Comprehensive blood panel and biomarker analysis from Alyria Health’s functional medicine team, reading your results against what’s individually optimal for you, not just what’s normal for the population. Movement screening, VO2 max testing, force plate analysis, and grip strength evaluation from WAVE Physical Therapy + Pilates; measurable, tested proof of how your body actually performs, not a guess. A 90-day functional medicine consultation to start, with the option to continue. Quarterly physical therapy reassessments with an updated plan each time, because a trend tells you more than a single snapshot ever will. And strength and conditioning programming through Driven Performance, built from your data and adjusted as that data changes.
Why grip strength and VO2 max testing, specifically
Of everything we could measure at that baseline visit, grip strength and cardiorespiratory fitness (VO2 max) keep showing up in the research as two of the strongest predictors of how, and how long, people actually live. Neither is a vanity number. Both are proxies for something much bigger: how well your whole system is functioning, not just whether a disease has been named yet.
Take grip strength. In 2015, The Lancet published findings from the PURE study, which followed 139,691 adults across 17 countries for a median of four years. For every 5 kg decline in grip strength, researchers found a 16% increase in risk of death from any cause, a 17% increase in cardiovascular death, and a 17% increase in non-cardiovascular death — with grip strength actually outperforming systolic blood pressure as a predictor of mortality. That’s a two-minute test on a hand dynamometer doing more predictive work than the blood pressure cuff at your annual physical.
Cardiorespiratory fitness tells a similarly striking story, and it holds up over follow-up periods most research never comes close to. A 2018 JAMA Network Open study out of Cleveland Clinic followed 122,007 patients for a median of 8.4 years and found that people in the “elite” fitness category had an 80% lower risk of death compared to the least fit group, with the benefit still climbing the fitter people got, no ceiling in sight. A 2022 study in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology followed more than 750,000 U.S. veterans and found the least fit had roughly four times the mortality risk of the most fit and that being unfit carried more risk than smoking, type 2 diabetes, or a history of cardiovascular disease. The fittest men and women in that study lived roughly six years longer than the least fit.
And the timeline that convinces us most: a Danish cohort of over 5,000 men followed for 46 years found that every single-unit increase in VO2 max was associated with 45 additional days of life, and that men with above-normal fitness in midlife lived nearly five years longer than those below it, a result that held even after excluding early deaths to rule out reverse causation.
None of these are studies about elite athletes. They’re studies about ordinary people, and what their bodies could actually do. That’s exactly why grip strength and VO2 max are two of the core measurements in your Outside View assessment, not because they’re easy to test, but because the research says they’re two of the most honest windows we have into how your body is actually aging.
All of it moves together across one 12-month arc, starting with an in-person baseline visit at Anchor Wellness Center in Kenwood, Cincinnati.
Frequently asked questions
Is Tidal Health covered by insurance?
No. Tidal Health is a private-pay program. Standard health insurance is built to reimburse treatment of diagnosed conditions, not proactive testing and reassessment for people who aren’t sick — which is the entire premise of a healthspan program.
What’s the difference between a healthspan program and a longevity or anti-aging program?
A longevity or anti-aging program is typically focused on adding years to your life. A healthspan program is focused on the years you already have, keeping you capable, independent, and free of chronic decline for as much of your life as possible.
Is Tidal Health a replacement for my primary care doctor?
No. Tidal Health is built for the long stretch between acute issues, not to replace urgent or primary care. If you have an acute medical issue, your primary care physician or urgent care remains the right first call.
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Research cited:
- Leong DP, Teo KK, Rangarajan S, et al. “Prognostic value of grip strength: findings from the Prospective Urban Rural Epidemiology (PURE) study.” The Lancet, 2015.
- Mandsager K, Harb S, Cremer P, et al. “Association of Cardiorespiratory Fitness With Long-term Mortality Among Adults Undergoing Exercise Treadmill Testing.” JAMA Network Open, 2018.
- Kokkinos P, Faselis C, Samuel IBH, et al. “Cardiorespiratory Fitness and Mortality Risk Across the Spectra of Age, Race, and Sex.” Journal of the American College of Cardiology, 2022.
- Clausen JSR, Marott JL, Holtermann A, et al. “Midlife Cardiorespiratory Fitness and the Long-Term Risk of Mortality: 46 Years of Follow-Up.” Journal of the American College of Cardiology, 2018.