Why So Many Doctors Neglect Their Own Health and How to Fix It

In this episode, Kevin Sullivan, AIF®, Financial Advisor at Warner Wealth, and Mark Jellison, a former Team USA decathlete, who has spent over 20 years helping people build sustainable systems for health and longevity, discuss how doctors often neglect their own health. 

 Despite doctors having extensive medical knowledge, some are gradually developing symptoms like chronic fatigue, weight gain, reduced strength and mobility, elevated stress levels, inconsistent sleep patterns, and a lack of stuctured physical activity due to stress of running their own practice and treating patients. 

Mark explains that with some small changes, doctors can get back on the right track with their own health journey. 

PODCAST INFO

Kevin R Sullivan, AIF® -   (Accredited Investment Fiduciary) Wealth Advisor at Warner Wealth, and the host of this podcast 

Website: www.WarnerWM.com

Email:  KDSullivan@WarnerWM.com

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Securities offered through LPL Financial, Member FINRA/SIPC. Advisory services offered through Warner Wealth, a Registered Investment Advisory Firm.

None of our guests are not sponsored by or affiliated with LPL Financial.  The opinions voiced in this podcast are for general information only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual. To determine which strategies or investments may be suitable for you, consult the appropriate qualified professional prior to making a decision. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:46

Welcome to Physician Wealth Meds. We like to say it's wealth medicine for doctors. It's our goal on this podcast to help you build wealth both inside and outside of your practice. And today we're going to be talking about something a little bit different because if you have no health, you might not have any wealth. Doctors are the most educated people in the room when it comes to the human body. Yet statistically, they're among the most physically neglected professionals in the country. Long shifts, chronic stress, and the cultural pressure to appear invincible all compound into the body that's quietly breaking down while careers demand more than ever. Like we hear all the time, if you have your wealth, you have everything. But if you don't have your health, man, that changes everything. There was a study through the World Health Organization that says 73% of physicians are above normal weight ranges, which means that 60% are not getting enough exercise according to the breakdown. And physicians that are over age 40 percentages are likely even higher because metabolism slows, practice demands are at peak status, administrative burdens increase, recovery becomes harder if you injure yourselves, and exercise for consistency declines during the mid-career years. It isn't about knowledge. Physicians already know what to do. The issue is having a repeatable system that works inside of a physician schedule. That's exactly why we have Mark Jellison here today of MarkjellisonCoaching.com to exercise us to work us through this particular topic today. So get ready. Everyone stretch and let's go.

SPEAKER_01 2:33

Welcome, Mark. Thank you so much, Kevin. I'm really excited to be here and discuss with you those topics you just mentioned briefly. And it's incredibly important for a lot of reasons to have this conversation about physicians and about doctors. So let's get in and let's get some good information to the audience. And thank you again for having me. My name is Mark Jellison. I'm from uh Boston area, and I'm now living in California. And how I got here is part of my story and part of this conversation. I was a track and field athlete in college, and when I was 19, my father passed away from a fatal heart attack. And he was on the outside as fit as a fiddle, and everyone in my hometown would speak highly of his health and how fast he was, and he was a pillar in the community and played softball with his friends and pick up basketball on Tuesday nights. And in his late 50s, he actually passed away playing basketball. And little did I know, but that was probably the route, now that I can reflect back, the root of my journey now in my mid-40s. So I came here after college to pursue my Olympic dream as a decathete. So I competed in the men's decathlon in college and after college. And although I never made it to the Olympics, I'm really proud and amazingly happy with being able to have represented the USA three times. And that was something that at the time was it was surreal. And during that time, I sponsored myself by becoming a group fitness exercise instructor. And I worked at UC Berkeley with their wellness department, and I dabbled in health coaching, and I became a certified strength and conditioning specialist. So I was wearing a lot of different hats around that time of my life where I was working in athletics and coming from elite athletics myself, and then getting into health coaching with people that were in this position we're talking about today. Stressed, overworked, having incredibly important jobs and responsibilities, but they didn't realize that the real responsibility to be there for their families and to show up for their career was to take care of themselves. So being in those different environments, I was able to over time, over more than 20 years, come up with the eye and longevity method. And what that basically brings us to now is how can I, as a strength coach and as someone in the in the health and wellness world as well, how can we deliver good information to save people's lives and to help people who actually save people's lives on a different level, doctors and physicians? How can we empower them to be more aware of what's happening in their life? Because they have the knowledge, they have the intellect, they have the excuse me, they have the community of other doctors. But when you wear that white robe, you have that status of being invincible and probably not always able to say, I need some help too. I need to work on my health. You know, let me put my hand up and ask for help myself when all you do is offer and help other people. So that's where I came from. Um it really stemmed from athletics and from my family. And following my own dreams and having that support system of coaches and departments that I've worked with and was able to be part, excuse me, and was able to be part of brought me where I am now, which is, you know, working with people for living anti-dementia lifestyle, uh, training, training youth athletic um environments where you know younger people are are looking forward for what they have ahead of them. And it all comes down to, you know, the asset, the resource is ourselves, but we don't always know how to take care of ourselves, right? You hear eat healthy, sleep, exercise, but that doesn't actually help anyone until you know how to implement implement the right systems to get you to do those things. So I found that most people are not suffering from lack of motivation. They have either no system or a broken system. And that's really where I'm at as a coach today is is finding lifestyle into a system that works for everyone.

SPEAKER_00 6:42

And that's the passion that leads you on, you know, for the ones who have a system, you're there. For the ones who don't have the system, you're there. Um and I can just see that fire being fueled by your own personal experiences like that. Um, and that's the kind of guests we have on the show. Someone that's got a passion to do what they do, because we all know doctors will go forever on their passion. But sometimes when you look in the mirror and you're saying, Man, I need to start focusing on myself too, to work on this. Because what you said about eating healthy, getting sleep, and exercise, all of those things are great things, but we want to break those down today so that you can see how you can fit those into your busy, already busy schedules to make it part of your lifestyle so that you don't neglect the person that you are. Hey, let me share a little secret with you, too. It's okay. It's okay to be where you're at, it's okay to work on yourself because you have to take care of yourself. It's just like in an airplane, put the mask on yourself before you put it on the others. You gotta take care of yourself.

SPEAKER_01 7:47

Exactly. And it's so easy to let days and weeks and months and decades go by and look back and go, wow, like, is this what I'm becoming now or is this me? And the answer is, you know, no, it's not. It's really not um an end game because of where you are now. I mean, what is that saying? You know, it's never, never too late, you know, never say never. But at the same time, to be able to speak up and be able to say, I'm either not happy or I want more or I demand more, like that's where the power is. That's where you can actually step up and inspire other people around you just by saying, you know, I'm worth it and you know, this is this is who I want to become. And it sometimes comes down to not looking at a phone before you go to bed so you have un don't have more likely to have unbroken sleep or to work on a shopping list so that when you're cooking your food, you know you have superfoods. If you're not sure like what's a superfood, just do a little research with with the internet and AI right now. You could type in, yeah, give me 15 superfoods that'll help proven to you know lengthen my my life and my longevity, and within 10 seconds you can have that shopping list, or you can even order it, you can even order it and have it delivered to your house.

SPEAKER_00 9:03

Yeah, yeah, that's true. And before you say, Well, I'll do it after my next shift or after this day, or after my son or daughter graduates, there's always a reason, right, to to maybe put it off, but there's always the need to tackle it head on. And uh we'll talk about that in this uh episode too, about the mindset and the lifestyle and what does that look like. I know you and I have had conversations before the podcast here, and you made some really good points that that piqued my interest. And let's just jump into the first one. You want to do that? We'll just hit it now because there's so many different things that we could cover in this. We were talking about physicians over 40 and how they're uniquely vulnerable to physical decline and why they're the last ones to possibly admit it. Talk to us a little bit about that.

SPEAKER_01 9:51

You know, it's it's ironic in a sense because this the same, you know, scientific methods that they're using to be, you know, to be who they are and be able to step into the office and save people's lives and give them the appropriate, you know, the appropriate information, whether it's the medicine or the discussion, you know, that's really, you know, that's almost the same thing that's holding them back is that they know so much, you know, physicians and doctors. So it's difficult to, again, step out of that bubble or take off the white coat and say, you know, maybe I need a coach, or maybe, maybe I've been doing it wrong for the last five plus years. And, you know, being a confident person in that environment is a must because of what they're dealing with. So it makes it that much harder to ask for help or to say, you know, maybe my information is somewhat outdated, or maybe I know exactly how to eat and how to get exercise, but I don't know what exercises to do. Or I have a bad back. Do I just not exercise now because I'm scared to get hurt and then I can't work and then I can't make an income? Or is there a way that I can work around that that makes sense? So, you know, being strong has a lot of different connotations. You can be strong-minded, you can be strong-willed, you can have strong muscles and joints. But just being able to say I can probably do something a little better, that in itself is is, in my opinion, the real strength.

SPEAKER_00 11:16

Oh, absolutely. I like how you put that. How can doctors fit fitness into their schedule to set aside this block of time? And I'm already time blocked to death. You know, how can I fit fitness into my schedule?

SPEAKER_01 11:32

And the time constraint is usually the number one thing that's either the mental block or the mental plus physical block, because in real time it's a physical and mental thing to show up and exercise. When do you do it? What do you do? How do you do it? How heavy do you do it? How many times do you do it? Right, all these things. So one thing that I think is really powerful to realize is that there is a minimum dose of exercise required in that stimulus you're putting on your body. So it's not really an exact amount of minutes you need. It's really to backtrack a little bit, you would set goals. And if you let's even say you don't even set goals right now, you just want to start exercising. You just want to start building lean muscle tissue, and you just want to enter in the training realm. Because exercise is saying, I can walk instead of taking the stairs. I can, you know, play with my kids instead of hide when they want to do stuff. But training is an actual plan, it's an actual system, it's an expectation, and there's responsibility and accountability. So if we talk about training versus exercise, yeah, you need a certain amount of time. I would even say give or take 20 minutes, three to four days or an hour plus per week is enough. So if you look at it like that, that might already lower some of the stress and anxiety of how do I do it, when do I do it, where do I do it, what do I do. So the minimum dose effect is something that we can either talk further about, but that's a real thing. And of course, doctors and physicians can relate to that because obviously the dose of medicine or the dose of some prescription is incredibly important.

SPEAKER_00 13:07

Doctors that I know that are doing this, they can't imagine their life without it. A lot of times we think, really, I'm gonna have to give up this to get that, or I'm gonna have to put this in my calendar. What about productivity and all the demands that I have on me? But for some reason, it just works, it just fits in. I know for me, I sit a lot as a wealth advisor as well. And uh, if I don't do what I know I need to do, feel it the next day. I know that just by getting the blood flowing makes me cognitively more aware and it just keeps me fresh, and I live for those moments, and it's something that I've come to grips with myself that this is what I can do in my profession, and as long as I can do this, I think I'll be okay. But having that plan, like you were saying, is just having something carved out that's designed for you, which might look completely different from another doctor, right?

SPEAKER_01 14:00

Right. Well, you know, some people either have the home gym or they have the gym membership, they most likely have some form of habit that's in place.

SPEAKER_00 14:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:09

And, you know, going back to my health coaching days at UC Berkeley, like if you can stack habits on habits or anchor them, that's like probably the best way. The greatest example is like someone who needs to drink more water, but they're like, ah, I always forget. I can never bring my water bottle. I can I walk past the water fountain, but I'm in a rush. Well, start here. Maybe you put a glass of water in the fridge the night before. So when you open it up the next morning, it's waiting for you and you just drink it. Or you put it next to your bed. So you wake up and you see it and you drink it. So out of sight, out of mind, but on the flip side, if it's in sight, you know, you can take it and run. So stacking or anchoring healthy habits or just habits towards your activity, incredibly important. More specifically towards what we're talking about, training, using some kind of an external resistance to get that stimulus for the minimum dose, I believe that kettlebells are one of the most efficient ways to do that. So if you have your gym membership and you have access to all the equipment, that's amazing because you're probably already going there, you already got the membership, you already got, you know, your commute, everything. But if you just have a yoga mat at home, that amount of space in either one or two kettlebells, maybe 20, 30, 40 pounds, you can do mobility drills, you can do upper body, lower body strength exercises like presses, pulls, squats, hinges. And then another thing that we could talk about, or that I believe is something that's missing and not really in the main conversation, is training your type two muscle fibers. And what that comes down to is your mitochondrial health and ballistic movements, things like kettlebell swings, kettlebell cleans. It's just a velocity-based movement rather than like a slow, heavy press or a slow squat, which is important and part of an part of any strength training program. But if you can safely include ballistic movements, you're training type two muscle fibers, which is gonna significantly reduce your risk of falling and getting hurt. And maybe not so much in the 40s and even 50s, but when you're 60s and 70s, no matter what, you're at a little bit of a greater, at least a little bit of a greater risk of falling. And if you fall and if you get injured, your recovery is slower, it's gonna affect your work performance, it's gonna affect your mental space. So ballistic training and kettlebells go hand in hand because it is such an easy way to perform a kettlebell swing as opposed to like a dumbbell swing or doing like a body weight pliometric, and a pliometric just moves, it's a rapid change of direction. So like going down and jumping up, right? You have a rapid change in length of the tissue. Not everybody can do impact-based training, especially as we age. So being resilient and durable is one thing, but if you just can't jump because you have a replaced knee or you're training on concrete in your garage and it's not smart, the ballistic training solves that because you don't have to leave the ground and you still get the effects of impact loading rather than having to impact load by jumping and landing.

SPEAKER_00 17:12

That's a good point. Because and it's important, I think, to know that there's different types like that, like you were saying. So if you can't do this, don't count yourself out. Because we all know what the landscape looks like now. Every doctor listening knows what their life looks like now. I think what they don't know is what would it look like if I started? What does it look like three years from now? Who could I be if I just say yes today?

SPEAKER_01 17:37

I just had a uh memory. I remember when I was learning the decathlon, I I had never pole vaulted. And that's one of the events that I had to learn in college. And I did not do that in high school. I don't even know if Massachusetts offered it in high school. And I remember learning it and seeing other people in track meets going, I'm jumping 12 and a half feet. How am I ever going to score? Because decathlon is based on points. So the higher you jump, the more points you get. How am I ever going to score six, seven hundred, eight hundred points and jump 15 feet, 16 feet? Because you only know what you know. And if all I know is this 12 foot six bar and guys are soaring over it that, you know, I can do what they do, right? It's kind of an ego thing at that point. I just had to put in the time and have the coach trust in me and put in the work. But same idea with exercise, like you were saying, where you are at now, you don't realize what could happen in three months, six months on the positive and the negative, right? You could have an accident, you could get sick, but you could train three days a week for 20 minutes, one hour a week, four hours a month, six months down the road now, your metabolism is different, your joints are behaving differently, your brain and serental nervous system is different simply because you're doing more consistent strength training. So it's really these small doses that accumulate. And as long as you're doing it safely with proper technique, and that's obviously why you either need a coach or some system, your potential is never going to be met. And if you're okay with that, that's okay. I'm okay saying that. But at the same time, for me, I'm the kind of person where like I don't want to do anything dangerous or recklessly, but I do want to know about my potential financially, health-wise, as a as a family person, as a community member, as a person on this earth. So it's really an aha moment that we say, or there's even a what the heck effect in strength training where let's say you just do deadlifts or kettlebell swings, and then all of a sudden you pick something up off the ground that you're like, wait, is this heavy? And you pick it up and you say, What the heck? Like that was way different than I expected it to be. And that is a real thing, it's a real phenomenon that happens after structured training happens for X amount of time. And it doesn't have to be years, it could be weeks, it could be months. And even better news, if you are at a lower threshold of training consistency, meaning you're not super fit right now or you're not consistently training right now, your ability to step up and uh come up a notch is enhanced simply because you're at a lower fitness level. You're gonna increase fitness levels more rapidly than someone who is already at a higher fitness level. Yeah. The world-class deadlifter that wants to deadlift 1,000 pounds, they want to improve by six pounds per year. So they can deadlift 1,006 pounds. So imagine trying to improve, I mean, what is that, less than 3%? Um, maybe even less. Sorry, the math in my head, I wanted to give a quick answer there. But you know, if if that was you or I and we're deadlifting 150 or 250 pounds, over three to six months, like if your goal was to get a strong back and legs and grip, you could easily add 50 pounds to that in three to six months.

SPEAKER_00 20:56

See, the thing that I noticed when I started doing it was my skeletal frame. I kept telling my wife, I said, Diane, I feel like my frame is just stronger to your point, about picking something up or even just walking with confidence, knowing that your frame feels stronger, so that when you do it, you can experience this. But it's just getting that first step. With every step of faith, the scenery changes. But you can put that into a lot of things in life. For with every step that you take into your unknown, the scenery is going to change, but you can't see it yet until you make that next step. And then once you make that next step, you start to see the scenery changing, whether that's focusing on your health or your wealth, whatever you're applying that to. And I've noticed that for myself. So that's why I wanted to ask you that question. We know what it looks like now, but where you could take these doctors through is pretty life-changing.

SPEAKER_01 21:51

It really is, and it and it is for a lot of reasons. I mean, I guess maybe on the surface, you know, it's it's not about aesthetics, but yeah, your your frame might change or probably will change. You know, the exercises that I coach and I teach and I partake in really deal with posture. You know, being able to move your pelvis, control your posture, which will in turn give you proper breathing patterns, which obviously breathing is important, not only to get oxygen to your brain, but to deliver to your muscles through strenuous exercise. So you're talking about your frame changing. You probably had a reduction in visceral fat too. So if you were holding fat around your ribs and your hips and your big muscle groups, you know, that's around your organs too, which you know, that's not really a good thing to add over time. It's proven that you're you're more morbid the more visceral fat you have. And if your posture can improve, you're talking about body language, you're talking about entering the room differently, you're talking about breathing differently. There's a uh an infrared video where someone I'm gonna turn sideways where someone is sitting at their desk like this, and you can see that the oxygen going to their brain is at a certain level and it's pretty low. And then they show you either the same person or someone else like this, typing upright in posture, and it's just like a funnel going straight to your brain. So go figure, right? But posture, body language, changing your frame. It's not necessarily the goal, although some people will train to improve their posture, but it's the consequence. So when you when you sh another example of if you just show up, the the good and positive sides are abundant, right? You have your neighbor commenting on how you look, your clothes fit differently, your postures better. You might be all of a sudden able to do another healthy habit more easily because you stepped into this habit of strength training or taking more accountability for your health. And it spirals just like it will spiral in the other direction. You know, you you build momentum and it's I mean, it's kind of cliche, but it's like you're almost unstoppable and you feel so good about that too. You really want to give yourself a pat on the back. And feeling that way, I think is just as important as looking a certain way. I have clients that have extreme aesthetics goals, and I have clients that really just want to wake up not in pain and be able to go to work not thinking about getting hurt. And I think everybody to some degree is somewhere in the middle. We all want to look a certain way, maybe it's not the biggest thing in your life, but nobody wants to be in pain. Nobody wants to not be able to pay play with their kids or their grandkids, nobody wants to go and get out of the car and re and then make a grunty, a grunty noise every time you have to stand up. So it really is abundant, and it just starts with having a system, having a training plan.

SPEAKER_00 24:41

So talk about the system. With the work that we do, we talk about when you're in the accumulation phase, uh, that's a whole different mindset than when you get into the income phase, you know, and and to have a system, you need an income system for yourself. What kind of a system uh should they be looking at?

SPEAKER_01 24:58

Well, anytime you start uh a training program or a training plan, whether it's with a personal trainer or a coach or on your own, you either want to have goals or some kind of an analysis, right? Are you injured? What's your current level at right now? What equipment do you have? Uh, you know, what apparatus are you going to be using? Is it body weight? Is it with a kettlebell? Is it at home? Is it at a gym? Is it outside in a park? Is it in a group with a class with an instructor? So there has to be some intake. Uh once, and and that could be done within, you know, 30 minutes. You know, do I have any real concerns with physical things? Does my doctor say don't let your heart rate get over a certain point? And it could be incredibly specific, right? What's your resting heart? You know, what's how many workouts have you done in the past month, past year, or have you not exercised in five years? In whatever the answer is, is perfect. Because by ignoring that or by not establishing that baseline, you're not going to be able to really compare your results to. So there's strength numbers, there's body circumferences, there's really generic ways to model this. But the system really comes down to creating a baseline, having a plan that brings you to the peak, and then reverse engineering so that safely you can get closer and closer and closer. So maybe uh one way to look at it is if you look at like an Olympic athlete, really with their coach, they look at four years, but with because you know, Olympics every four years. But within those four years, you have micro phases, which is usually two to four weeks at a time, it could even be less, and then bigger than a micro phase is a mesophase, and then a macro phase. So the macro phase might be the whole year. So they have four macro phases. Then you look at meso as you know, they're only training hard in competition from February to July. Everything else is prep and post than this competition season. So, you know, when you when you talk about time, you can go as far as you want. But for for what we're talking about, our audience, I think it's probably better to think month to month or even week to week if that helps you step in the arena and get going. So instead of making this big master plan, I'm gonna do this and for six months, I'm gonna do that. It doesn't matter if you don't do anything this week. If you don't have an equipment, piece of equipment to train with, you know, go spend $50 and buy two kettlebells, or buy some bands and start doing resistance training with bands. Um and I remember you mentioned just a moment ago the accumulation phase. There's such a thing in strength training as well, and that's literally when you're accumulating repetitions to build volume, and building volume is not the only way to progress, but there's such a thing as the accumulation phase where you literally just want to get some muscle soreness. You're not gonna be lifting super heavy, you're gonna be accumulating this all together, and your body adapts. You recover faster, your body will get used to the stimulus, you'll have to progressively overload to continually get any kind of result. Otherwise, you know, you're gonna sit still. And to be honest, sitting still isn't the worst thing. We don't want to step back, but all in all, we want to be moving forward. We want to be stronger, we want to have a little more lean muscle tissue, we want to drop the visceral fat. We want to see that resting heart rate lower. So the baseline could be just several things equipment, time per day or per week, some goals, but it could be the list could be 10 to 50 things as well.

SPEAKER_00 28:40

So if you're thinking about the practical next steps that a doctor could do, like today, tomorrow, this week, what would you say to a doctor that's maybe thinking, man, this guy's talking to me?

SPEAKER_01 28:51

Yeah, today I would do the quick um intake. You know, if you have equipment, great, that that you're done today. If you don't, you know, either research what you what's realistic, you know, you're probably not gonna go spend $500 to $1,000 today on a home gym. If you do, that's great. Um, or you might look, okay, well, how much does a 25-pound kettlebell cost? Go down to Dick's Sporting Goods or order it online. Um tomorrow, I would say, you know, say this is where I'm gonna do my first workout. And you need the size of a yoga mat to do a safe, proper strength training. If you have a garage, if you have a gym, if you have a backyard, if you have a field, great. But all you need is about the size of a yoga mat. And then I would also say bring someone from the outside in. Tell your spouse or your partner, tell one of your colleagues, tell one of your kids or friends, share it with them. Because if you don't have a training, if you have a training partner, beautiful, that's gonna help you. But if you don't, by sharing it, putting it out in the universe, just like anything else, it's more likely to happen. Right. If you hold all this stuff in, oh, I have these fitness goals, you know, even if that motivates you to kind of be the, ah, I'm gonna show the world, I'm gonna do this all on my own, like you could probably get it done, especially with our audience that's that, you know, gritty and strong-willed. But if you share it and you let it out in the universe, it's a little, you know, hokey pokey, but I really think that that's incredibly strong because then it's not all on your shoulders. And you never know when they're gonna come to you and check in and say, Hey, I remember you told me you were gonna start your routine. Like, how did it go? And if you have started it, you're gonna have a big old smile on your face when you tell them. And if you haven't started it, you're gonna be like, wow, you know, I kind of let them down a little bit. They seemed like they were thinking about this and they knew it was important to me. So you don't want to have shame, you don't want to feel like that, but get it out in the universe and tell someone what you're thinking or what you're planning on doing.

SPEAKER_00 30:54

Yeah, because a lot of doctors internalize things and they struggle with things that no one knows about, and they get out of your head. And it also probably would help for accountability too for all of this going on. Tell the doctors what life looks like on the other side. A lot of times when we go on vacation, this is my analogy. When you go to vacation, you want the palm trees, the sand, the beach. You know, you want to focus on that. Uh, but you don't want to focus on the TSA, the airports, the long luggage lines, or getting your luggage lost, or the time it takes to get to the airport to pull it all off. And that's kind of like the nuts and bolts, nitty-gritty. But yeah, tell them what life can look like on the other side once they start something like this.

SPEAKER_01 31:36

Yeah, that's that's really a powerful question, right there. What it can look like is really unlimited. And what I mean by that is it could be about envisioning the beach vacation and you know, taking your shirt off or something like that. But it could just be knowing that you're making it happen, you're putting your best foot forward. Your kids or your grandkids or your spouse or your friends are gonna see and know that you're doing this. And if they're at all in tune with, you know, how important your health is because you are doing this, it's gonna feel so good. But I would say the identity shift is what you're looking for. You're gonna all of a sudden realize that you're using sentences more like I am someone who trains and not someone who's saying, I'm trying to find time to training, I'm trying to get this going, I want to do X, Y, Z. It becomes I will, I am, and I'm going to. And that's incredibly powerful because it gets easier and easier. Like I remember when I had I have two sons, and when my first son was born, I had to take a step back in my health. Um, you know, I was relatively fit, and then I think for a good three months, I didn't get in a proper workout. So, you know, I didn't like become broken and gain 30 pounds or whatever. But at the same time, like uh this is my career. I'm a trainer and a coach. I gotta, I gotta show up in front of people and exercise and do this and that, and I have my own desires with my body. But I had to step back. And when I came back, I said, okay, I know that I'm not gonna be able to do 10 pull-ups like I used to be able to do. I know that I'm not gonna be able to deadlift whatever because I haven't lifted weights in three months. But I also knew that with the proper system, I could get that back, and it didn't have to take five years. Yeah. So I find that the older I get, my goals shift a little bit to you know, less ambitious athletic things like I had in my 20s and my 30s. And now it's you know about playing with my kids, not being hurt, being strong. I still want to look a certain way, but I know that all of those things can intertwine and overlap by just getting maybe three. I do shoot for four or even more quick workouts per week. But if I go week to week, back to back, month to month, without getting two or three workouts per week, I'm only gonna go so far. So the identity shifts where you can be in several years or several months, or I gotta be honest with you, in several weeks, it's a little bit of an unknown because you we only know what we know. And if you've never done three or four workouts in a week, either your whole life or since you know five, 10, 15 plus years ago, you don't know what's gonna happen. You might love it so much that you start talking about it endlessly with people, or you might have this new level of aspiration that you're just walking around with a goofy grin on your face because you're thinking about the next opportunity you you have to get your training session? That's a real thing. Not everybody needs to love training, but you should love the fact that you're doing this to take care of yourself so that you can take care of others.

SPEAKER_00 34:56

Absolutely. Ah man, I couldn't have said it better. That was beautiful. Yeah, so any closing remarks? Anything you would like to, is there anything that we're missing that you want to make sure that our listeners know?

SPEAKER_01 35:08

Yeah, there's a couple things I want to say uh if I have the time. Thank you. You know, the the first thing is that everyone listening knows this, but I want to say it. Fitness and health is real. Everyone's like, duh. And what I mean by that is things don't happen by themselves. Just like you didn't pass your med, your boards, and you know, do all the amazing things with your intellect and your grit and the support and the things you did 100% on your own, those all happen because you put the time and the effort and you had your calendar and you went through all those challenges. So training and exercise doesn't have to be that grueling. It doesn't have to be something you pick yourself up off the floor with a spatula and then you know can't walk for two or three days and in brag, like, oh, I did this squat workout, I can't walk the next day. That's not what health and fitness is about. Health and fitness is about training and exercising and moving on to the next thing. It's about being efficient and taking over your environment, whether it's your garage or your gym or your yoga mat area or your living room with a kettlebell. So I feel that there's just as much of an identity and a mental shift once you're actually in it, and that could be after one workout or one week, it doesn't have to be six months, just as much in the mental identity shift as there is in clothes fitting differently. Even doing blood work and looking at all of the markers, biomarkers, you know, blood lipid profile, you know, testosterone levels, things that are incredibly profound and incredibly scientific that you need, you know, like a hospital for, for example. So all of those things are real. It's not a waste of time, number one. It's not a waste of time, and it doesn't take a lot of time. That minimal dose effect to get that stimulus required to change, could be 20 minutes or less, three to four days a week. That's actually quite a bit if you think about getting 12 to 16 workouts per month. And that could happen at less than four hours per month. That's number one. Number two is that as powerful as it is to do these things on your own, it's easier and it's a little bit more fun if you have someone you can share it with. So it could be a community, it could be with me as a coach. You could even just write out, reach out to me, not even wanting to work together, and tell me that you started to train on your own, and I will love that message. I will love and I will write that back, and I would love to communicate with you about that. So whether it's just putting it out in the universe, sharing it with someone in your life, or with you know, someone like myself. And also exercise is magical. What I mean by that is you could be getting a coffee at wherever you get coffee from, and you could just start having a conversation with someone and you could partake in that conversation because everyone has health. And you can either overhear something and you know kind of butt your way in there, and and if that's your personality, if that's where your identity shifts to. But if you've ever been in a moment where you do jump into a conversation and you fit right in and you're talking to strangers, and all of a sudden you're all talking about the same thing, like that's magical. And that happens with fitness because everyone can relate to exercise, and it could even be, man, I hate sweating my butt off, but I love getting it over with. And then all of a sudden everybody's laughing, and these are strangers. So, not that you're gonna go out there and look around in your coffee shop to part to butt into someone's conversation, but training is magic. It really can lighten up the room. And then the third thing, I guess I would talk a little bit more specifically about the program itself that you know hovers around three pillars. The main pillar, the thing that takes up the most time is the strength training. I call it primal strength training. It's functional movement patterns, which means you know, you're really hovering around your big five or six movements. You're pressing, you're pulling, you're carrying, you're squatting, and you're hinging. There's other movements like you know, you can add plyometrics, you can add lunging, which is which is like a squat. It's like a knee-dominant squat if you're doing a lunge, but you're really living around these five movements. And as powerful as I told you that the ballistic exercises are, the hit the uh the kettlebell swing or the velocity-based and the speed-based movements to train your type two muscle fibers, if you're not able to or you're not ready to do that, you could learn the precursor, which is a hip hinge. So if you had a hip hinge, you you would be able to do a kettlebell swing. If you had a hip hinge, you'd be able to do a kettlebell clean. And if you had any of those things, your entire universe with a kettlebell exists and revolves around that hip hinge. So if you could do one thing once you are able to get the equipment and have the ability to be wearing the right clothing and have the space, it'd be to practice the hip hinge because from there it's almost unlimited. Single arm hinges, single arm cleans, single arm swings, two-handed, you know, changing your foot stance. So you can recycle through all these things and it's a full body movement. So even if you have bad shoulders and a bad neck and you can't do overhead stuff, that's okay because you can load your spine, which will attribute towards grip strength and you know, uh more posture by doing your hip hinge. And number two would be the hormonal uh performance framework, where optimally you would get blood work. You could get, you know, just your generic blood work that has, you know, just like maybe 10 or 15 things, but you also could use like a Merrick Health that does 50 to 100 biomarkers. I've partnered up with them. I'm happy to uh leave Kevin with you with you uh a resource with them if you want. I'm I'm probably a lot of the physicians here listening are familiar with Merrick Health, M-A-R-E-C-K. They're they're basically just like um they work through like a lab corp um opportunity where there's locations like wherever you are, unless you're in like a very, very, very remote location, and you get a big I actually pay for it through the iron longevity method, but um I partnered with them for people who are interested in getting even more analysis in the blood work for a test, baseline, retest at some point or at the end of the program. And then the third part is the mental edge. You know, the mental edge allows us to not look at training like it's some moral code we have to do that involves shame and pride, right? Be proud of what you are doing and who you are, but mental edge coaching really comes down to staying away from procrastination rituals and you know, being part of that identity shift that we talked about. So there's a workbook, it's very uh it's not very time consuming at all. And the goal of the program is not to suck up your time and give you this amazing outcome. It's to give you that amazing outcome by enabling the three systems, the strength training, the hormonal uh performance framework, and the mental edge coaching to happen simultaneously. The things that I was able to do as a college athlete and as an elite-level uh USA decathete while working, you know, I used to go from uh Berkeley to San Francisco, and I would get home at 10 o'clock at night, and I'd get up for an early client the next day, and it was not fun because I did a lot of that by myself. I had training partners that I could rely on, but much of what I did was these horrible lactic acid-driven workouts when nobody was looking. And, you know, then going and teaching a group exercise class and sneaking off and getting a burrito so that I didn't like pass out after two hours. And what I learned was that you can do these things enabling all three systems, the strength training, you know, sleeping and eating a certain way, and maybe having the blood work to look at your hormonal profile and to have the mindset that allows you to show up every day. Those can happen simultaneously rather than being more stressed out about trying to find all these rituals and all these habits and all doing a lifestyle overhaul. It's not about that, it's about simultaneous integration of a system.

SPEAKER_00 43:59

That's awesome. That's exactly why we have you on, by the way. Because I because that that is exactly it right there. Um, how can I get in touch with you and and all of that? Tell us a little bit about that.

SPEAKER_01 44:12

Yeah, so I have uh I have a website and an email address. I mean, um I would give you my phone number too, but that that's probably a little odd. Um, but yeah, my email that you can reach me at is markjellisoncoaching at gmail.com, and my name is M-A-R-K, J E L L I S O N, coaching at gmail.com. And it's the same website, so it's markjellisoncoaching.com, where there's specifics on the iron longevity method, as well as my contact information, so my phone number is there, as well as the email. And if you wanted to book a call, I am more than happy to offer a 20-minute plus absolutely free conversation with anyone who wants to talk about their health, wants to talk about where they are now, wants to talk about how to get in the door of what is training and what is it about in your 40s, in your 50s, in your 60s. I have several clients that are in my in their not my 80s, that are in their 80s as well. So do not put yourself in an age bracket and say this is how it's going to be. If you take anything away from what I've shared with you today, it's that, and you said it too, Kevin, you don't know what's going to happen six months or one year or five years from now. So where you're at is where you should be, but don't make the decision about what's going to happen next week or next month or next year. Don't already decide your future. So I hope you take me up on that. I would like to set aside five positions in the iron longevity method because you will have complete access to me. Like if I was blessed enough to have, say, 10 people that wanted to join the program, you know, that's a lot of uh that's a lot of meetings and a lot of information and a lot of intake. But at the very least, please take me up on the call. I would love to talk to 10, 20, 30, or even 100 people that are listening. If I could only influence you to buy a kettlebell, I'll share some videos with you on how to learn the hip hinge or learn the kettlebell swing. And then maybe we could actually do some coaching together if that seemed like it was a good fit for either of us.

SPEAKER_00 46:22

Yeah, because everybody needs someone that's outside of themselves to keep them motivated and keep them reaching on, which is excellent. Absolutely joining us today.

SPEAKER_01 46:32

It's so inspiring too when you see someone like if when I see someone in the park exercising, doing Tai Chi, or bringing a kettlebell and walking around with good posture, like I just want to go up to them and be like, you make me want to go home and work out right now. So never overlook the amount of inspiration you will give to other people just by showing that you are willing to do it for yourself.

SPEAKER_00 46:57

Yes. Mark, thank you very much. We've been working with physicians for decades, and most doctors spend their entire lives taking care of everyone else's emergencies while they quietly postpone their own life. And it's kind of what we've been talking about. You build the practice, you build the income, you build the reputation, you sacrifice your sleep, you push through the stress, and you keep going because that's what you do, you know, and you've got a passion to do it. But eventually there comes a moment where you have to ask yourself, what is all this for? Because if I don't have my health, energy, or freedom to enjoy it, what's the point? Your patients need you healthy, your family needs your present, your future self needs you to start right now, not someday, or not after the next shift. The truth is, you don't need another extreme program. You don't need to be perfect, you don't need to become someone else overnight, but you do need a system. You need a system that works for your life, a system that restores your energy, and a system that helps you feel strong again physically and mentally and emotionally, it's not just about the money, it's about having the health and the vitality to live the life fully that you were created to do. So if today's episode connected with you in any way, and if there's a part of you that knows it's time to stop putting yourself last, then take action today. Walk, train, sleep better, schedule the checkup, reach out for help, start the system, call Mark or email Mark because five years from now, you'll either be grateful that you started today, or you'll be the one that wishing that you had started. So thank you for joining us on Physician Wealth Meds today. It's a wealth podcast for doctors. I'm Kevin Sullivan reminding you that true wealth isn't just what you've built financially, it's about having the life, the health, and the freedom to enjoy it. So, Mark, thank you so much for joining us here today. I appreciate you, Mark Jellisoncoaching.com. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_01 49:05

Thank you so much, everybody. Thank you, Kevin.

SPEAKER_00 49:11

The opinions voiced in this podcast are for general information only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual. To determine which strategies or investments may be suitable for you, consult the appropriate qualified professional prior to making a decision. Mark Jellison coaching is not affiliated with or endorsed by LPL Financial and Warner Wealth.