Staying Fit While Staying Home - Expert Advice From Resident Chiropractors

Welcome to episode two of Catch Up with ChiroTouch, our new podcast series where we will be discussing the state of the chiropractic profession, tips and tricks to manage and grow your practice, and share expert advice from a variety of guest speakers. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Brian Blask. I'm an account executive with ChiroTouch where I get to consult with chiropractors to determine what software solution is best for them.

I'm excited to have Dr. Calee McClure with us here today. She's one of our resident DCs who works with chiropractic colleges across the nation. In this episode, we're going to spend some time talking about how to stay fit while staying home.

Hi Calee, how are you?

Hey Brian, I'm great. How are you?

Wonderful. I want to start here by explaining really what you've been doing for us during our quarantine time. To our audience, they obviously don't know that we have a human resources platform that we're able to log into and see inter-office communication, like ChiroTouch has their inter-office communication within the software.

We have that at ChiroTouch allowing us to get notifications of birthdays, share files. Can you explain to our audience what you're doing for our ChiroTouch staff?

Yeah, absolutely. So, after everybody obviously in the country or in the world had to start working from home or working remote, I thought about, you know what, we have a lot of employees at our company that have desk jobs, probably a majority of them do. And so I worked with our HR department and came up with the idea of how about I do a daily stretch, kind of the setup of, you know, your workstation and then how you can stretch out throughout the day just to give yourself a break.

So I called it kind of like the two minutes, the two minute break. So what I did is I came up with some stretching ideas and then I would go ahead and post them on our HR intranet for our company and did one every day of the week and then just ask for feedback if any of the employees needed additional help. So that was the idea behind it and it took off really well.

Yeah, it's been phenomenal. Everyone's really kind of taken those stretches and exercises and really implementing them on a daily basis, which is important right now, right? Considering what we have going on across the nation where everyone is staying home.

So as a practicing chiropractor right now, let's bring this kind of full circle as to talking on a podcast as to why we want to do this type of stuff. Why is it a good idea to kind of use this to communicate with your patients?

You know, it's a great engagement. So it would be great for patient engagement and just staying on top of mind and helping out your patient community. And so I was I was actually taken back by, you know, the questions and the responses and the thank yous of just the people from the company.

And I thought, wow, this would be a great way for chiropractors to stay engaged with their patients. And then even further, maybe outreach to their communities. You know, when you when you give this type of information to a patient, there's no reason to not, you know, ask them, hey, you know, if you have a friend that's in need, you know, share this with a friend.

If you work with a company that, you know, obviously, everybody has to be remote, talk to your HR, share it with them, and they can share it with the company as well. Because everybody, you know, in times like this, everybody would like some engagement with somebody. And with all the positive feedback with exercise and staying fit, this is a great way to do it.

Yeah, that's that's perfect. And I love how you're saying patient engagement. Because when we, you know, at ChiroTouch here, we've been talking to a lot of chiropractors for different webinars, different podcasts, blog posts.

And a lot of what chiropractors are saying is, we just need to continue to engage with our patients. Right? So being able to just give them content like this, I think is very important because, you know, now you're able to stay on the forefront of their mind.

Right? So would you do this? Like you said, do we need to adjust your patients?

What else do you think about kind of partnering with other area organizations, stuff like that?

Yeah, absolutely. I would definitely do that with area organizations. Maybe, you know, depending on where your office is set up, if you're in an office building, different companies in the office, in the same office building, if you're in a strip mall setting, maybe touch base with those businesses as well.

And, you know, do community outreach. Something on social media, that would be a great way to, you know, get it out there further than just your patient base. But I think starting with your patient base would be ideal.

And then just grow it from there. And, you know, take some time to set it up and really plan it out. And this could really actually end up being a great marketing tool for you.

That's a phenomenal point right there, because now you can brand yourself as, you know, overall fitness, I mean, not just coming in and adjusting the spine, right? As chiropractors, we provide so much more to our patients. And I think the public perception for most people is just coming to get adjusted.

So if you can brand yourself more as, you know, assume you want this, being able to provide stretching, strengthening exercises, now being able to get that information out there because, you know, we learn all about it in school and we continue to take continuing education classes on it. So being able to get that information out into the marketplace, I think is just going to improve your brand and your business. Wouldn't you agree?

Oh, yeah, absolutely, definitely, for sure. And, you know, and one of the things that I did with this is you're going to know your patient base, obviously. And I kind of had an idea about, you know, our company employee based.

But there's going to be different levels of ability, you know. And so when you're doing it, you know, just think about that where, you know, you may have a beginner, you may have somebody who's intermediate, you may have somebody who's super active, and you know, they are just depends on what your patient base is. But just keep in mind when you're doing it and creating these exercise plans, or the daily exercise to give options of modification.

So you know, you want to make sure that you not only reach your patient base, but also give them an idea of how to do a stretch, and then maybe a modification to that stretch or the same thing with an exercise. And just that way everybody can participate.

That's a great point. You mentioned the key word there, I think, for me was reaching your patient base. So a couple of things you can do with ChiroTouch, assuming people that are listening to this are ChiroTouch users, not all of you probably are ChiroTouch users, some of you are, some of you are not, maybe office managers.

But if you're using ChiroTouch right now, you can send personalized stretching and exercises through CT SmartFit, which is direct integration for exercises. So you can send videos that way. One of the other things you can do is mass email, right?

You can mass email right out of ChiroTouch. You can use CT in touch, so you can use that for two-way communication. So you can get this to your database, patient base, by using ChiroTouch, with a myriad of different ways.

Absolutely.

What about for different businesses? What will be a couple of ideas there maybe to kind of drop this knowledge on local businesses to help build your brand?

Yeah. So what I did for our company is I laid my plan out, and then I did a written description of each stretch or exercise along with pictures. So my daughters, they were my models, and then we did a video as well.

So we're hitting each learner, being able with a written description, a picture and a video. Then, you know what? Brand it.

Put it on your letterhead. Put it, make a specific email, do a social media post, and then share it that way. There's so many different things you can do, but put the information there, and then be creative with how you get it out there.

One of the things I loved was the cadence organization of your info. I loved how you would focus on one part of the body. Everyone's a little bit different.

Sometimes you want to work shoulders and neck, sometimes a little back. What's your influence there?

I just figured to start at the top and work all the way down. That's just why I came up with the idea and the cadence of focusing on one region of the body. So I just started with the neck, head and neck, and then worked our weight, worked my way down.

And then as I did it, I went through a lot of static stretches to begin with, just because I was thinking of the more beginning steps of stretching, because not everybody is a great stretcher. People, even who are very active, tend to miss the stretching step with their activities and warmups and cool downs. So I started with a series of static stretches and just one day we did neck, the next day we did thoracic or maybe shoulder and then just kind of worked our way down.

And then by the end of the series and the end of the month, I started adding more dynamic stretching. So it's kind of your next step up or for those who are runners or super active, dynamic stretching is so important. And so I went ahead and then evolved it into more of a dynamic stretching routine.

So where do you get all this information? Because some people don't know they don't have access to CT Smart Fit, or they might not be ChiroTouch users yet. So where else can people go to get this type of stretching information?

So, you know, there's a lot of places, obviously, the internet. You can always Google different websites or stretches, and things come up on YouTube and all that kind of stuff. You know, I'm the club, the fitness health club that we are members at, they actually started doing this on their app.

And so, you know, looking through there and seeing what they had, my daughters both are members at sports performance training facilities. And with everybody having to stay home, they were sending exercises and stretches every week to them. And so just the combination of all different areas.

And like you said, CT SmartFit is a fantastic way to get the information and get it out to your patients. So, yeah, there's tons of different outlets to look at.

So not only just stretching, but I mean, you can also, I guess, as chiropractors, we should be getting this information to our patient base, but then also getting the overall fitness idea out there to them too, right? Like promoting proper nutrition, daily routines, walks with cardio, anything else there that you would recommend our chiropractors kind of promote out to their patient base when it comes to overall fitness while everyone's home.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Just motion, you know, motion is lotion. So just, you know, just getting out there.

Like I said, you know, you know what you're paying, who your patients are and your patient base and their abilities, you know, different walking, I, you know, tips on walking, stretching before, stretching after, same thing with running, definitely nutrition. You know, I have a couple of friends that came up with these ideas of a daily recipe. And so they send out daily recipes.

You know, we all kind of run out of ideas of cooking, now that we're all cooking a ton from home. So, a daily recipe, that was an idea that a few of my friends shared with me.

That's great because now you can get on social media. Everybody loves social media as it is. It's obviously here to stay.

But you can get on even as a chiropractor and you can post those types of things right on Facebook and Instagram. You can even search, like if you want to search up for those ideas, my wife will search Pinterest all the time for new recipes for us. But it's a great time right now to develop those types of healthier habits, right?

Healthier nutrition when it comes to drinking more water, those things we never do, that we can now promote, right?

All these things are, you know, it's kind of, this time is kind of the time for a reset. And, you know, why not reset, start fresh, start clean, start healthy?

So to quick recap for our listeners, we want to make sure you engage with your patient base. You want to make sure that you're sending out information that's going to help them, you know, with all these stretches, tips and tricks there, to make sure we're continuing to move, produce that overall fitness, that goal, branding ourselves, increasing our patient base by maybe partnering with, you know, businesses around us. Anything else, you know, that you want to add here to help out our fellow chiropractors?

Yeah, another idea, actually, that I was talking with a friend of mine who is a chiro here in the Kansas City area is engaging with your patients in activities like a push-up, you know, a push-up challenge or a burpee challenge or something like that, and then getting gift cards from local restaurants and, you know, having a competition that way. So not only are you engaging just with your patients, you're also engaging with your community. So coming up with ideas, just staying on top of, you know, top of mind with your patients and helping your community, I think is huge right now.

That's a great point because we're going to come out of this, right? We're going to come out of this as more health conscious. I mean, what's right now, this is a health concern, it's a health craze.

So as chiropractors, you can really come out of this ahead by being a health expert and branding yourself that way because we are. We just got to let the rest of America realize that we're here to help and we have this knowledge and the ability to adjust you and help you with this type of fitness and strengthening when it comes to overall immunity, it's chiropractic care. Well, thanks again, Dr. Calee McClure, for giving us ideas on how to keep our bodies fit while staying home.

And thank you for catching up with ChiroTouch for our second episode this week. Next week, I will have Dr. Jeremy Todd to talk to us about how to keep control of your practice during these times while finding ways to adapt and change to our new normal. Thanks again, Calee.

Have a great week, everyone.

‍