They deal with health-care issues each and every day: Four physicians and the business manager for the private practice that one of them runs. So when the opportunity came to take part in the Fittest Execs and Fittest Companies Challenge, members of Metro Med’s Team No. 2 were being called out.
And they responded like—well, champions. Because they’ve been judged the Fittest Team in the challenge, posting an average final fitness score of 146 points. Point of perspective: The aggregate possible point total on the scale of health indicators tested only goes to 150. Among its five members, the team boasted winners of two individual categories, Fittest Man Over 50 and a tie for Most Improved Woman Under 50.
Over the three months of the Fittest Execs competition, team members averaged increases of slightly more than 12 points in their final test scores. That’s a figure for which all four men on the team can thank Stacey Gates, general counsel and business manager for Gates Hospitalists. Her 28-point improvement accounted for nearly half of the bump in the final team score. But let’s be clear: The guys started out at fitness levels most of us won’t see without spending years on the treadmill.
“We had some people who were very dedicated, not only to the program, but to improving their own level of fitness,” said Steve Reintjes, of the Kansas City Neurosurgery Group and past president of Metro Med. His own measure of dedication? A 15-point pop in his personal fitness score.
Indeed, said teamate John Sheldon, an oncologist and the recent past president of Metro Med, peer pressure was a factor. But so was the nature of employment for those involved.
“My primary interest in getting a team together was that physicians should be in the business of promoting efforts like these,” Sheldon said. “If physicians don’t advocate for better health, who will?”
Besides, Sheldon slyly noted, the timing of the program, ending just with the onset of winter, had a secondary benefit: “I wanted to get in shape for skiing season.”
Ted Higgins, the senior member of the group, wasn’t taking any back seats to the others; he also made a double-digit score improvement with 10 points. But that wasn’t the surgeon’s goal going in.
“I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I did enjoy the opportunity to measure my fitness level,” Higgins said. “The best thing was getting a baseline of my physical strengths and weaknesses.”
Lancer Gates, a doctor of osteopathy, credited some of his improvements to the two hours a week he spent with a personal trainer, hitting the kettle bells and focusing on strength and flexibility. The cardio work, he did on his own.
Gates took a longer-term and more paternal view of the personal successes he and Stacey—parents of six children, ages 6 months to 11 years—enjoyed while competing with the team: “I want to be there for my children, and my children’s children down the road.” 