Episode 54: Launching a Health and Wellness Program with Annette Zapp, CSCS*D
Big spoiler alert: most fire departments don't need a fitness program; they need a comprehensive health and wellness program. This week's podcast episode has a few life updates (moving, gym equipment, and B.A. vs. A.A., AKA before Andy and after Andy) and a skeleton to follow if you're attempting to start a Health and Wellness Program in your department.
If you can't be bothered to listen, here are the wavetops:
Physicals first (as comprehensive as possible)
Allocated time-you can't accomplish anything without time. And saying, "We allow our firefighters to work out on duty," isn't the same as, "We specifically allocate and carve out time because it's that important."
Quality education
Invest in a coach
Then worry about space and equipment
Bells, whistles, incentives, toys...those are low priority
So what, now what?
This job takes an enormous toll on our physical and mental health. We can't just decide we will give up and phone it in. Our families, our fellow firefighters, and the citizens we serve deserve better. Ideally, departments will take the brunt of the responsibility by providing services, time, and equipment. But if the department isn't doing it, you need to. You get only one shot at your life. Make it count.
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Check out my Episode with Katie Dabrowski
Check out my Episode with All Things Cardiopulm
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Episode 54
Annette: [00:00:00] Hey listeners, it is AZ. I am here with Episode 54 of the Fire Rescue Wellness Podcast, and in case you missed it, I am taking a bit of time off from the Friday episodes; probably just for the summer. I have a few things going on, and also we're being perfectly honest, when you're doing a podcast, you want people to listen and when I went from one episode a week to two episodes a week, my total listens per week increased by a lot, but my listens per episode decreased somewhat significantly.
And so I started to wonder, is it too much content or are people maybe just self-sorting now into the episodes that interest them? I know when James Geering from Behind the Shield, went from one episode to two, I just got overwhelmed. I couldn't keep up anymore, and so I was less motivated to listen.
So [00:01:00] I wanna do just a little experiment and see how it goes. I've already gotten some great feedback and some great suggestions from some of y'all, but if you have any feedback about the podcast or anything in general, I always encourage you to reach out and send it either via email, via Instagram message, however you wanna send it. I would love to hear from you.
A little bit of a life update first today. In case you haven't been following along on Instagra, I've been having some fairly significant knee problems for 18 months or so now. And I tried so hard to work around it. I tried doing more training. I tried doing less training. I tried massage and red light and CBD and anti-inflammatories and chiropractic and vision training and vestibular training. I threw everything [00:02:00] at these silly knees that I could think of, and finally the pain just…it got debilitating on a daily basis.
They were so sore. I just sounded like I was Canadian. Sorry about that. Oh my gosh, Scott Forbes, here I come. Anyway, I was so sore on a daily basis that I was just having a hard time functioning. And I did my due diligence. I went to an orthopedic doctor and they took MRIs and X-rays, and of course they found pathology, operable pathology, or treatable pathology.
And then because of the way it happened, I went also to a rheumatologist to make sure that my arthritic symptoms weren't rheumatoid in nature, or weren't autoimmune in nature. I also worked with two just unbelievable physical therapists: my girl Katie Dabrowski at Old Bull Athletics, and then my [00:03:00] girl Rachele Burriesci with All Things Cardiopulm.
We did a lot with the lymphatic system and with lymphatic drainage and the entire gamut. And so I finally had a steroid injection in my knee, which you would normally assume is gonna provide you with a lot of relief. I got zero, zero relief, like absolutely nothing. And so I made another appointment to go and see the orthopedic doctor and he said,” I have great news, Annette. I have a definitive treatment that's gonna make this all better.”
And so I was, expecting him to say like a gel injection or something like that. And what he said was “the way your knees look and what you're reporting to me, I think your definitive treatment is a total knee replacement, not just one. Two. I think that both sides are going to eventually need to be replaced. Now we can try a gel [00:04:00] injection, and that might get you three months down the road, but. If you don't get relief from that, you are now three months down the road before you can have any other sort of treatment.”
So after careful consideration, talking to a lot of people, multiple trips back to the orthopedic surgeon, talking to my work doing all of the things I have elected to embark on this journey of getting a new knee; I like to call it bionic a new knee on June 2nd. Which is a lot because I'm also in the midst of selling my house and moving and retirement is looming. A lot of things are going on, but, my quality of life has been declining for 18 months, and I preach this all the time. Our physical health and our mental health are intimately related, and I'm here to tell you it's true. My mental health, my state of [00:05:00] mind, my happiness in life has been diminishing chunk by chunk ever since. This inability to effectively use my body has happened. And so I'm a little bit nervous about this, but I'm also really excited. I'm really excited to get this process underway and to reclaim my life.
So that's update number one. Update number two. In the Bible they have BC and AC before Christ and after Christ. While in my life, I have BA and AA before Andy and after Andy. Andy is my best friend, and he has been my best friend for 19 years now. We met on a call…he is a police officer-I am a firefighter. We met on a call and he ended up riding to the hospital with us for the protection of the ambulance crew. We [00:06:00] played 20 questions on the way to the hospital and the rest is history. We have been friends for 19 years, so BA and AA before Andy and after Andy.
And this move, might I just tell you, is really stressful because not only am I packing up my life and selling my house, I'm also trying to offload possessions, sell furniture, get rid of things that I don't need so that I don't have to store them for a year before I permanently relocate. And that's hard to know am I gonna want these Christmas dishes in a year, or should I just give them away to the goodwill? That's stressful.
But I had a huge blow this week. I had a moving, I'd call it expert, come in and take a look at my house because I was thinking of having [00:07:00] them move everything into storage. And I would obviously pay for the storage. I knew that it would be a little bit more expensive than just say a POD or a U-haul room, but, the gentleman walked into my basement and he took one look at my gym and he said these words: “are you sure you wanna keep all this?”
Yeah, buddy. I wanna keep all this. This is my gym. Some women love their shoe collection and some women love their…I don't know, jewelry or their cars or their whatever. I love my gym. During Covid, guess what? It didn't affect me because I had my own gym. It's been a profit center where I trained people. It's a place where I shoot my videos for my clients and it's a place that I use every single day. I have a treadmill, but there aren't clothes hanging [00:08:00] on my treadmill. You know what's hanging on my treadmill? Me. I have a pull-up bar, but I don't use it to, again, with the clothes, I don't use it to dry my clothes. I do pull-ups. I have a squat rack. I don't lean shit against it. I do squats. At least I try with a stupid knees, but what I'm saying is I've accumulated this high quality gym equipment over the course of the last 18 years. I would not be able to afford to replace it.
So, then he drops the bomb that everything both the moving it, the storing it, the relocating it, it's all by the pound. And so it's just gonna cost me tens of thousands of dollars to move this and store it.
And so unfortunately we started in the basement and I couldn't even pay attention to him for the rest of the tour because I'm thinking, I know this is dramatic, I know this really sounds like a complaining, [00:09:00] privileged baby, but I felt like my life was over, like everything that I know and love was gonna be taken away from me, and so I just, I sat with it.
I sat with it for a minute and I thought, I can't do this. I made a mistake selling my house early and I was trying to time the market to some extent because I don't think the market is gonna be as good a year from now. I was trying to capitalize on how much money I would make at my house, and now it's gonna cost me two to three times as much to live monthly than it would've been just to stay here and take less for my house in a year.
And I was really sad and depressed. And so I went to bed even earlier than usual because what do you do when you're sad and depressed? Sleep. It's good for your mental health. And I woke up in the morning [00:10:00] and I just…I accepted it. I accepted the fact that I was going to have to sell my brand new belt squat, my brand new sled, my rogue pull-up bar, my top quality treadmill, my spinning bike I've had since I was a master instructor. My concept II rower, my plyo boxes, my squat rack, my landmine. My bumper plates, my dumbbells, (I have dumbbells from five to 85 pounds), my kettlebells, (I have kettlebells from 10 to a hundred pounds), sandbags (I have a pile of sandbags), jam balls, I have it all. I have a full-service gym, and I just came to the conclusion that I was just, I was gonna have to sell it. It didn't make sense to keep it.
And so I just started sending out a few text messages to a few people saying, “Hey, let [00:11:00] me know if you know anyone in the market for some fitness equipment, because I'm willing to sell it as a package to one person for the right price.” And one of those people I sent the text message to was my friend Andy, and he texted me back almost right away, and he wanted details.
Why are you doing this? Why would you consider this? I can't believe you're even considering this. And I said, “I have to. I just can't…it's not fiscally responsible of me to spend that much money.” And even though I'll never be able to afford to replace this equipment because when I bought dumbbells, they were 50 cents on the pound. When I bought bumper plates, they were like 90 cents on the pound. Dumbbells are now way over a dollar per pound, and bumper plates are two to two 50 a pound at least. So even just to replace my [00:12:00] dumbbells on my bumper plates, I wasn't gonna be able to do it.
So he said, hold on, just take a breath. I'm gonna see what I can do. And within a matter of minutes he had contacted his brother who has an empty room in his basement and he said, I can store my gym equipment there. And he said, “I will help you move it”.
This, my friends. This is why we are best friends. He knew how important that was to me and he jumped in and helped me find a solution in a matter of minutes.
And so thank you, Andy. I appreciate you. Thank you, Nick. I appreciate you and I am so happy that I'm gonna be able to keep all of my gym equipment. So that's my life update.
Let's [00:13:00] actually hop in now to talk a little bit about gym equipment. We will get to that topic in a minute, but I get this question all of the time.
In fact, I have someone who set up a discovery call with me for this coming week about this exact topic, which is: I feel like we need to set up a fitness program at our fire department, and I don't know where to start. Can you help?
First of all, I truly believe that departments don't need a fitness program. They need a comprehensive health and wellness program. Fitness is a part of that Health and Wellness program. But if you are looking just for a fitness program, I think you're missing such big pieces of it. I have this sort of setup and a hierarchy of importance and. To some extent, as a department, you can choose your own adventure.
You can pick and choose [00:14:00] the pieces that you're missing or where you need some help, but I really believe that by starting at the beginning and prioritizing the correct things, you're gonna be so much more successful in the long run. Before I forget to tell you, I mentioned discovery calls. If you ever wanna set up a discovery call with me, all you have to do is go to my Instagram bio and click on discovery call, or I will also put it in the link to the show notes.
And the discovery call is basically a 15-minute call where you tell me what your challenge is, what you're looking for, and I help you figure out can I help you? Or can I point you in the direction to other resources? If you're hopping on a discovery call, hoping to get a comprehensive plan for your department and a whole bunch of help, you will be disappointed. But I will tell you if I can help you or I will give you some [00:15:00] alternative resources on a discovery call.
So what I'm gonna be talking to this gentleman about when we have our discovery call is the first thing I'm gonna say is, do you have in place comprehensive medical physicals? In other words, NFPA compliant medical physicals.
And to some extent we can also make this into a little bit of a hierarchy because some departments will say, we're too small, we don't have enough money. We're volunteers. We can't afford to give our members a physical. And so my comeback to that is everyone is entitled to a yearly physical through their insurance.
And so at the very minimum, members should be going to their personal doctor every year and getting as comprehensive as of a physical as they possibly can. One step up from that would be [00:16:00] a physical and then NFPA compliant blood work. And so all of the normal cbc, blood lipids, so on and so forth, that the NFPA would require.
That would be a step up. The next step up would be a completely compliant NPFA physical, and that is now based on your age. You get certain tests and certain benefits based on your age. And then one step up from that would be the NFPA compliant physical, including extra blood work such as sex hormones, insulin, C-reactive protein. So on and so forth. All of these sort of extra screenings that would be important for firefighters to have potentially cancer screening, ultrasound, cancer screening, potentially ultra fast [00:17:00] heart scan. Any sort of extra testing I think would be that upper echelon of physicals.
But at the very least, if you're talking to me about a health and wellness program, every member of the department should be getting a physical every single year. That's step one.
Step two is providing your members with time to be active. Time is our most valuable resource, and if we tell people they need to do something, but don't give them the time to do it, we're setting them up for failure. I just got off the phone with Joe Gallie, Elgin, Illinois Union President. And we were having a great conversation about supplementation and exercise and all of the things, and somehow we got on time and I said, “Joe, here's the problem: Covid taught us that we don't have to do stuff in person. We can do stuff remotely [00:18:00] or on a Zoom call, but my department now, they're, instead of having us come together for EMS training once a week, I'm sorry, once a month for three and a half hours. They're just putting that training on the schedule, and we're responsible for getting it done, but we're not provided with the three and a half hours anymore. And so we've lost the resource of time, but we're still having the expectation of getting the training done, and that's a problem.”
So before we assign any training, physical fitness, anything like that, we need to carve out time in the schedule for the people to get it done. What you can do and what has worked really well for our department is doing an analysis of your runs of your call volume and you can identify the time of day where you're least busy and then you could designate that as your physical fitness training time [00:19:00] or your physical education training time, meaning if you're having someone come in and talk about nutrition or sleep, you would have it during that designated time.
Plot twist or maybe shortcut, I don't know what to call it. Most departments, their least busy time is between 4:00 AM and 9:00 AM so we just do it pretty much first thing in the morning. 7:30 AM is when we have our physical fitness time. To decrease the barrier of entry,we come in our physical fitness clothes, we do our rig checks, we have our morning meeting, and then we do our physical fitness and it's done for the day.
So, step one, comprehensive medical physicals. Step two, providing and carving out time. Because here's the thing, saying we allow our personnel to work out on duty when they're not busy is not the same thing as saying we carve out time for our personnel to work out on duty. It's not the same thing.
Number [00:20:00] three is education. It's very interesting, but firefighters seem to respond well to educational programs presented by culturally competent people. They don't respond well to education from people who talk to them like they don't understand the job. And so I feel like my education is often very well received because I not only have the background in strength and conditioning and nutrition, I have the background in firefighting as well.
And I'm never going to say something ridiculous to them regarding sleep or time management or nutrition or anything like that, because I understand the job too. But bringing in highly skilled but culturally competent people to do educational programs is very impactful in the [00:21:00] fire service. So that's number three, providing education.
Number four, I would say, is providing coaching. Whether that is one-on-one coaching, whether it's on demand coaching, meaning I can make an appointment with the coach, whether that coach is coming in three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and running group fitness training sessions, whatever that looks like.
Having someone who has an expertise, not just an interest. Not just a passion in health and wellness, but actual expertise in health, wellness and fitness. I think that's the next important step.
So to recap, so far we have comprehensive medical physicals. We have carving out time, we have providing education, and not just any education, quality education. And the fourth one is [00:22:00] hiring a coach. Depending upon what your department looks like, how big it is, that may be different for department to department. But hiring a coach I think is the next important thing.
The next one, this may surprise you and I'm gonna give you the next two space. Providing space and then providing equipment. Many departments get this backwards. In fact, they may put equipment as the number one thing before physicals, before time before education. If we get them a treadmill, an elliptical, and some dumbbells, they're going to quote work out. I would say back up the truck, put it in reverse and back up fast.
We need to provide them with space, with safe flooring, we need to have ventilation. We wanna make sure that space isn't primarily on the [00:23:00] apparatus floor where they're exposed to diesel fumes, if you don't have diesel recovery systems in your station.
We need to provide them with space and then some basic equipment.
And firefighters get excited. They want squat racks and they want ellipticals, they want the Peloton and a step mill. They want specialized, oh, a hammer strength chest press. They really want big and exciting equipment. But truly, you can start with some simple pieces. You could start with some sandbags. Some jump ropes. You could start with a hex bar and some bumper plates, maybe a few kettlebells. You could outfit your firefighter gym for probably under a thousand dollars. Would it be nice to have a treadmill? Sure. Would I have a treadmill in my gym? Would it be nice to have a Concept II rower? Absolutely. [00:24:00] I have one of those two and I really like it.
But do I need it? No, probably not. It sure is nice to have that treadmill in the middle of Illinois' Winter, but I don't need it.
So, number five is space, and number six is equipment.
Number seven. And this is another one that tends to get bunched up at the beginning because again, we get excited. I call this bells whistles and incentive swag. So things like apps, things like a peloton, things like t-shirts, things like you get a vacation day, an extra half vacation day if you train on shift four out of five shifts. Things like a Fitness tracker watch if you sign up for this program. All of these [00:25:00] things are nice to have, but not the bare bones and meat of the program.
If you put…I would say this is the cart, and if you put this at the beginning, before the physicals, the time, the education, the coach, the space and the equipment. Again, you're setting yourself up for failure. You're getting people excited to train and work out and get fit without giving them the tools.
I started this out by saying, people keep asking me about a fitness program. But what they really need is a comprehensive health and wellness program, and here's what makes it comprehensive: The health physicals, the providing them time to actually get things done. The education piece, what should they be educated on? Sleep, [00:26:00] nutrition, mental health, stress reduction. Of course, injury prevention or mitigation, (it's really hard to prevent injuries in the fire service.) We can educate them on smoking cessation. We can educate them on drinking. We can educate them….I don't know if I said sleep already, but I'm gonna say it again if I did all of those things are pieces of the health and wellness program because in case you need a reminder, the way that we're losing our firefighters on duty, cardiovascular disease and accidents, off-duty, cancer, and suicide, all of those things are pieces of the prevention part of the mortality risk.
So in summary, I'm gonna say it one more time in case you missed any of it.
First and foremost, medical physicals. Second, carve out time. Third, provide quality [00:27:00] education. Fourth, get them some coaching, whether it's someone showing up every week or on demand. Provide them with space. Get them some basic equipment and wait till the very end for any bells, whistles or incentives.
No calls to action this week, except if you ever wanna hop on a discovery call, click the link in the show notes, it'll bring you to my scheduler. And just remember, we don't solve the problems on the discovery call. I just figure out if it would make sense for us to work together.
Thank you so much for listening. This has been AZ and I am out.
