Reversing Chronic Disease & Recovery Strategies with Oliver Eehn

Chronic diseases are on the rise, affecting millions globally. How can we handle and even reverse the progression of these chronic conditions? Our guest, Oliver Eehn is the Founder of Optimum Fitness Systems and brings over 40 years of expertise in health and fitness, specializing in diseases like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and stroke recovery. He holds several certifications, specializing in athletic/sports conditioning, injury/post-rehabilitation, bodybuilding, powerlifting, senior fitness, and other areas. Throughout the episode, Oliver discuss the ways of managing various chronic diseases, from physical injuries to mental conditions like Parkinson's and dementia. He also shares his plans to expand his impact on public health, reaching out to both the general public and fitness professionals. His goal is to raise awareness, educate, and empower individuals and businesses to prioritize health and wellness. Tune in to learn how small lifestyle changes can make a big difference in your health journey. --- Listen to the podcast here: Reversing Chronic Disease & Recovery Strategies with Oliver Eehn Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. One of the problems that we’ve observed quite a bit today and had a really big uptick over the past, say, half a century is the prevalence of chronic diseases. This is something we haven’t talked about quite yet on this podcast but we have talked generally about health, both mental and physical health, and health can definitely get in the way of you being able to follow whatever dream, whatever passion that you’re trying to pursue. Today, my guest, Oliver Eehn, who is the founder of Optimum Fitness Systems, is going to talk a little bit about what we can do about chronic diseases, both from the recovery and prevention side. --- Oliver, welcome to the program. Thank you, Stephen. It’s a pleasure to be here. Well, thanks for joining and thanks for talking to us about a topic that we have yet to really talk about these chronic diseases. So, obviously, you’ve seen this, you have a passionate about it. What is making some of these chronic diseases so prevalent today? Unfortunately, it’s just lack of activity, poor food planning, dieting, and everything that ties along with that, and it’s just, of course, not to mention just the quality of the foods that are available today, along with all the added preservatives and processing that goes into it. And so you put all that together, yes, that is definitely an equation for disaster down the road. My quest, if you want to call it that, is to now help educate the public about this as well as to encourage them to just better lifestyle and healthy living.Share on X Yeah, it is disturbing to see how many people are living with some kind of chronic disease. What brought you into this particular pursuit? What did you observe that made you decide that Optimum Fitness System is what you wanted to do? It wasn’t planned that way, it’s just kind of as a lot of your other fellow business people, some of your other guests have talked about, this is kind of how life --- as life just kind of flows along, we just move along and then it’s --- some of it, it’s just more by default, if you will, because that was kind of your tip, growing up as an athlete myself, and endure a lot of my own injuries, football being my main sport, of course, you play football, yeah, you’re asking for injuries over the years, just become my own patient. And then just through that process, just became a weightlifting, fitness enthusiast through that process and just made sense to now, it’s obviously tried to do something business wise in that regard. And so, as I started just working with folks and just the typical like most personal trainers do early on is help people lose weight and just kind of get back in shape and that’s, ’til this day, I mean, those are still the most common reasons why people would hire us. Along the path that, as I started taking on this disease, I still remember 25 years ago, almost to this day, that I took on my first Parkinson’s disease patient, and as a young trainer myself, okay, just somebody else that I’m just going to have now kind of help them get stronger and so didn’t really understand the whole process, some of the neurological effects and just kind of how all that plays into it, and so just trained them like I essentially would, of course, modified, like I would train any other client and then he wonderfully just was able to just see improvements, improve his right and just regain a lot of his function. But I will say, Stephen, it was really over these last five, maybe less than ten years that I really been now focusing on this aspect of physical fitness part when you start talking about how exercise can not only slow down the progression of a lot of these diseases but even reverse their effects. And so we talked a little bit about these trends about how it just seems like everywhere, a lot of these diseases, you talk about Parkinson’s, you talk about Alzheimer’s, you talk about a few others, seem to be getting more and more prevalent. Is that part of what you were seeing as these diseases became more and more prevalent, you just started to encounter it more, you just started to encounter more people that came to you with that the same way it first started five years ago? Exactly, yes, and then through that process, just like as people now are discovering that, “Hey, here, you gotta meet Oliver who’s a personal trainer that specializes in helping people with injuries, helping people with diseases,” and so it just naturally made sense that my clientele will grow in that regard. And when I built my first health club, this was back in 2003, like any enthusiastic business person, fitness professional, that was my dream to always kind of own my own fitness facility and then, of course, we always had to incorporate the personal training side of that too. And then that’s when I started getting some stroke patients to now become part of that system and then kind of now it’s just like sort of you kind of learn on the fly. Okay, what do I do with the stroke victim? And then you kind of watch that progression as it goes and kind of learn it so you’re essentially just kind of just reading one page ahead of them as you kind of learn this process. Depending on how the severity of their stroke was, then we just kind of work with it accordingly. And there, again, some of them, we’ve seen just wonderful progress of how people are now able to just regain some of that function and strength along the way as they do that. How does it feel for you personally when you witness one of your customers, one of these life changing experiences and end up being able to get some or all of their kind of original functioning back? That’s why I really consider my job, my business, very rewarding. It’s just, as they say, it’s like if you just are able to find something that you love doing, you’d never have to work a day in your life. And so this is my passion, to just help folks from all backgrounds, from all socioeconomic backgrounds did now be able to just regain some of their confidence just along the way as they regain their physical conditioning. And that is quite amazing. Now, are there aspects of your job that you don’t love? Because I think every business has like the operational, accounting, all that type of stuff, are you able to offload the stuff that you don’t enjoy doing? Oh, yeah, there you go. Yeah. And people may use different numbers but mine is, I call it the 90-10 rule, meaning probably 90 percent of what goes on in my business could probably be done better by somebody else. I’m not an accountant so I hired an accountant to take care of that part. When it comes to marketing and advertising, I am just totally clueless about just what goes on with that and how to do that and a few times, I’ve tried that on my own, yeah, it was just kind of disappointing there, obviously, and so, therefore, yeah, so these are the folks that I would have to have on my team to now help me through the process. And in fact, I’m now writing a book specifically about now working with these diseased patients, these individuals now like to be able to help them along just through physical fitness and good nutrition and that process. Now, recently, I’ve hired myself a good writer-editor to now help me do that process. So, yeah, just a lot of parts of your business, regardless of what your business may be, it probably could be done better by somebody else so I just focus on a 10 percent that I know that only I can do. Yeah, how to work with people who have these chronic diseases or just wanting to get in better shape, which is what you want to do. What did it take for you to get to the point where you could comfortably hire out those positions? Did you originally have to do your own marketing just to get enough revenue coming in to where you could hire that out? Correct, yes. Well, most of that began when I, of course, began my first health club and, I mean, when you’re talking like over 20 years ago, this was before social media even existed, before even much of the internet was still kind of coming into vogue so we still did like the old-fashioned print mailing, newspaper ads, things of that nature. That’s kind of how I started in that process. And then, of course, as a lot of that evolved over these years. I’m here again, social media, that’s just something I’m just clueless about so it’s like, again, I would just have to refer to those who are experts in that field and to kind of help me along on that side. I’m still learning this. And so throughout your journey, because running a business, regardless of how much you hire out, how much you don’t,...