Today on the blog, we are bringing you an interview with a special guest, Mr. Patrick Diver about all things health and wellness. We’re going to focus on exercise, we’re going to focus on being active, all these things that we’re advising patients to do. Patrick Diver is going to share what he does in his personal training studio and how you can apply some of those principles to get the most out of your health and exercise.
Dr. Merrill:
How long have you been doing what you’ve been doing and what is it that you do?
Patrick Diver:
I own a personal training studio called Strength Clinic. It’s on the West Side of College Park and I’ve owned the studio for 8 years. My background is in Sports Medicine. Initially, I started off as a Certified Athletic Trainer, and then that morphed over time into just doing personal training. I don’t do rehab per se, but we do collaborate when working with patients who have joint issues.
Dr. Merrill:
It’s such a fine line between personal training, just staying healthy versus getting back to being healthy. I all of us are always going through some portion of that, right? Even if it’s not a diagnosed shoulder injury, my shoulder hurt sometimes after I lift. So I’m always rehabbing and maintaining that.
Patrick Diver:
What I do is essentially physical therapy for already relatively healthy people.
Dr. Merrill:
Yeah, it’s all just a spectrum of health to sickness, to wellness. So, I want to talk a little bit about Strength Clinic Orlando too, because it’s a very good model that I’ve never seen before. Can you tell me about your philosophy?
Patrick Diver:
Strength Clinic is, as the name implies, focused on strength training. I believe building and maintaining muscle mass is the most important thing you can do for your physical health. We focus strictly on strength training, but we do it in a manner that’s joint-friendly. We’re very conscious about only doing exercises that are protective of the joints and won’t cause further damage. A lot of our people are 40, 50, 60 plus, they’ve had a lifetime of accumulation of injuries, sports injuries and car accidents and just general wear and tear. So it’s not unusual for someone to go seek out some sort of fitness solution in their 40s or 50s or 60s and they just flare something up. So everything we do is designed to be joint-friendly, yet effective to help them increase their strength.
Dr. Merrill:
We see that in our practice as well. The first part of January here at Nightlight Chiropractic is a little bit slower because deductibles reset, patients are working hard on their new year’s resolution to get fit. But then the second half of January we get bombarded with new patients and old patients alike, who have injured themselves at the gym. I wanted to go over some of those ironclad rules from Strength Clinic Orlando that are really applicable, not just for getting good results, but also for maintaining that safety so that you, the viewer, don’t become another victim of over-training.
Patrick Diver:
I created a video called the Ironclad Rules of Strength Clinic. The whole idea was to put together a video that summarizes what I believe is a really practical approach to maintaining fitness throughout a lifetime. So the principles and what I talk about would be good for children, for seniors, and take you all the way through life. I’ve narrowed down to what I believe are the eight most important things a person needs to focus on.
IRONCLAD RULE NUMBER ONE: PROTECT YOUR STRENGTH
It’s critical that a person really protects their strength. As we get older, as we mature from children to adults, we gain physical strength. But then around 30, we start losing physical strength. And that has a lot of deleterious effects on the body.
Dr. Merrill:
Do you have to lose strength? Is it automatically going away once you hit 30?
Patrick Diver:
Well, if you don’t do something to actively challenge your strength, yes it does. It’s gradual, so you don’t just look in the mirror one day and you’re strong and the next day you’re not. When you look at your parents or your grandparents and you see smaller frames, you see weaker people and there are effects to that.
Dr. Merrill:
Right. So not cardiovascular, we’re not talking about yoga, we’re not talking about anything except muscle strength, right?
Patrick Diver:
Right, muscle strength. But muscle strength and your muscular system do tie into the cardiovascular system and it all ties together. If you were to look at your health and fitness life as a pyramid, strength training should be at the bottom of that pyramid. You can do yoga and you can cycle and you can do tennis and things like that. But it does not fill that role of muscle strength.
Most other exercises offer incomplete strength building. You can build some strength doing yoga, you can build strength playing tennis, but if you want to maximize your strength, it’s going to start with actual strength training exercises and they can be done safely and really efficiently. You can be done in 15 or 20 minutes once a week.
IRONCLAD RULE NUMBER TWO: TRAIN WITH INTENSITY
The second rule is to train with intensity. A lot of people when they’re starting off strength training, they’ll get five-pound dumbbells. But your body adapts to the challenge of those weights really quickly. So you’re not constantly pushing yourself and your body really sees no reason to keep getting stronger.
Dr. Merrill:
Right. It gets used to that five pounds and that’s as much as it needs to do. It’s not going to go beyond that ever.
Patrick Diver:
Right, right. So you want to train with intensity. You really want to challenge your muscles with each workout. Everyone, it doesn’t matter their age, even people in their 90s can strength train safely.
Dr. Merrill:
Absolutely. The foundation of knowing what you’re doing is the cornerstone of the safety portion that you talk about.
IRONCLAD RULE NUMBER 3: RESPECT YOUR JOINTS
Patrick Diver:
The third ironclad rule is to respect your joints. A lot of people get involved with different fitness programs and they end up flaring up old injuries because they’re not aware of how they’re doing the exercise is going to affect that old injury. You really want to respect your joints and make sure that if you’re starting a program and you’re having pain in a joint, you back off completely until you figure out exactly what’s going on. The big mistake people make is they feel something a little bit, but then they go back to the gym and they do more and until they’re really in trouble.
If I’m working out and I feel something wrong in my joints, I just stop immediately.
Dr. Merrill:
Absolutely. I had a patient of mine ask a question. She wanted to know if it’s possible for a person to be too broken or too unhealthy to ever start on that path of getting strong?
Patrick Diver:
No, of course not. There are studies with 90-year-olds that have significantly improved their strength. A trained professional who knows what they’re doing will be able to take someone with any condition. Even, I’ve trained cancer patients, I’ve trained people with hip replacements, knee replacements, all that stuff.
IRONCLAD RULE NUMBER 4: SYSTEMATIZE
It’s important to build systems because it’s really easy for people to say, “Well you just need to create new habits.” Instead, what I do is to create a system and if you do that system consciously and you do it enough, eventually it turns into a habit. And once you have enough of these little habits, they become a new lifestyle. So a system could be, for example, to improve your sleep. It’s really easy to get caught up and to stay up an hour or two too late at night. So a system could be setting an alarm to go to bed.
If you know you need to go to bed at 10:00 PM every night, set an alarm at 9:30 to remind yourself that it’s time to go to bed. So, that’s a good system. Or let’s say you want to increase how much fruit or vegetables you’re eating. If you’re going to try to eat two or three pieces of fruit each day, maybe you could have a system. As soon as you wake up, you grab a banana and when you’re getting ready for each day, you eat a banana. If you implement something like that, these are just little systems. When you add them up and you do them enough, they turn into habits, and over time it becomes a lifestyle.
You can eat a banana tomorrow morning. You can also schedule in your calendar your strength training session. Whether you’re doing it by yourself at home or with a trainer or going to a gym. You can write it in your calendar and kind of build that system and over time the habit will take place and you have a new lifestyle.
Dr. Merrill:
As we’re talking about habits, habits are kind of difficult to form, but once they’re there they’re also difficult to break, right? So even though it’s really difficult to start that habit of including strength training into your day or to your life, once it’s there, it’s there. So the good news is that you can almost put your brain on autopilot and not have to worry as you’re going through the grind and the gruel of doing the training. So what’s the next ironclad rule?
IRONCLAD RULE NUMBER 5: KEEP RECORDS
I think it’s really important if you’re working out that you write out the exercises that you’re doing and how much weight you’re using and how many repetitions you do. You need some sort of record to know the next time you do it, are you in fact improving? And over time you will accumulate years and years of workout records. So I can look back and see progress. It’s really easy, especially with today’s apps. You can keep track of everything on phone apps now. One record a person should keep is their weight, and you want to weigh yourself every day. You want to look at the weekly average because your weight fluctuates so much day to day. It can go up 2, 3, 4% due to stress or medications or a whole host of things. That weekly number will tell you, are you trending down or up?
IRONCLAD RULE NUMBER 6: BE STOIC
Stoicism is an approach to training where basically you’re just coming in, you’re doing the workout and you’re leaving and you’re not making a big drama about it. The problem is, a lot of people because maybe it’s not so comfortable to work out, they’ll complain about it. Sometimes they’ll do it on social media and it rewires the brain and complaining begets more complaining. And if you’re complaining about it, it indicates that you don’t want to do it. The ironclad rules are all about sustainability, not fitness. If your headspace goes in a negative way, it’s going to affect how long you actually train. I try to maintain a stoic approach. When I’m working out, I do the exercise, I move to the next, I try to teach my clients to do the same thing without complaining about, “Oh, you’re killing me,” and stuff like that. Don’t let those thoughts out or don’t verbalize them. It’s important for the long term.
Dr. Merrill:
So that’s not just for your benefit that people aren’t complaining around. It’s for their benefit.
Patrick Diver:
It’s for them.
Dr. Merrill:
We reiterate a lot of that here. When I ask how you’re doing, people are like, “Oh, I don’t really want to complain.” I want to hear what’s wrong with you, but at the same time, if you focus on that, you’re going to get all that negative energy and you’re not going to get better. We have to start with kind of a positive attitude. The process might not be so much fun, right? You come in here, we’re adjusting, we’re doing manual therapy. It’s uncomfortable for you. But the end goal is what we’re all talking about.
IRON CLAD RULE NUMBER 7: KEEP A RELAXED FOCUS
Patrick Diver:
Tying into that is the next one. You want to try to keep a relaxed focus. So what does that mean? It’s kind of the yin and yang of it all. If you’re pursuing fitness over the long term, you don’t want to be too into the details and weighing yourself five times a day and just being overly uptight about your workout and worrying about whether this is working or that’s working. People that have success with fitness, they don’t think about it that much. Don’t over worry about it, but you want to be focused enough that you do it each week and each month. And next thing you know, the months roll into years and the habit’s there.
IRONCLAD RULE NUMBER 8: LIVE AN ACTIVE LIFE
Patrick Diver:
You want to try to live an active life. There are two reasons for it. One is it helps create feel-good chemicals in the brain, so it makes you feel better. Second, those activities are group activities in a lot of cases, so there is a social component as well.
Research over the last 20 years has identified the muscle system as an endocrine organ, much like your thyroid. An endocrine organ is releasing chemical messengers throughout your body. And what’s interesting is it affects systems in your body that you might not be aware of. For example, your immune system is affected by your muscle mass. Your anti-inflammatory response is affected by your muscle mass, your blood glucose metabolism is affected by your muscle mass. Researchers recommended that muscle mass be considered another vital sign when medical personnel look at you. Along with blood pressure and your temperature and your weight, they want to include muscle mass because muscle mass is so linked to different health outcomes. For example, if you have breast cancer, you’ll have a better outcome if you’re going into that situation with more muscle mass. If you’re in intensive, your health outcome is better if you have more muscle mass. You’re just better off with more muscle mass. That’s why I’m so passionate about strength training, it is the basis of health.
Dr. Merrill:
I think that’s fantastic. Can you tell the viewers out there where they can find more about you?
Patrick Diver:
Sure thing. My website is mystrengthclinic.com. You can also find me on Facebook at Strength Clinic Orlando.
