How Do Doctors Stay Healthy Enough To Practice A Full Career?

Practice ownership is a physical job: protecting the asset that produces the income

Walk through any well-run practice and count the maintenance plans. The compressor has one. The vacuum system has one. The imaging equipment, the sterilizers, the HVAC — all serviced on schedule, because everyone understands that when the equipment goes down, production stops.

Now ask what the maintenance plan is for the doctor. In most practices, the single asset that produces every dollar of revenue — the owner’s working body — runs on no plan at all. Coffee, adrenaline, and a vague intention to get back in shape after the next busy season.

The numbers on this are unforgiving. Dentistry is performed bent forward, rotated, and static for hours at a time, and musculoskeletal pain is one of the leading reasons dentists cut back hours or leave clinical practice early. Shorten a career by five years and the cost isn’t a gym membership — it’s five years of peak earnings, plus a practice that sells for less because it was slowing down instead of growing when the buyer looked at it.

We spent a Dentelligentsia episode on this with Mike Coval, owner of Coval Fitness in Ann Arbor — “the physicians’ personal trainer,” whose client roster filled up with doctors referring other doctors. What he sees on intake, and the mistakes he watches smart people make, apply to every practice owner we work with.

The two complaints on every intake form

Nearly every doctor who walks into Coval’s gym reports the same pair of problems: chronic aches — back, neck, shoulders, the occupational signature of chairside work — and no energy. Not “I want a six-pack.” Just: I hurt, and I’m exhausted by Thursday.

Both are treatable, and rarely in the way the doctor assumes. Coval’s assessments start with movement screens and orthopedic testing, and they routinely surface a different culprit than the one on the form. “What they think their biggest struggle is might not actually be their biggest struggle,” he told us. “You’re working out plenty hard — you’re just sleeping four hours a night and starving yourself at 1,100 calories a day.” The workout wasn’t the problem. The recovery was.

Three mistakes smart doctors make

The first is following a generalized program — the app, the bootcamp, the plan built for nobody in particular. It works for a while, then plateaus, because it isn’t built around your body’s specific restrictions and your schedule’s specific brutality.

The second is grinding as a proxy for progress. “Just because you’re lying in a puddle of sweat and can barely breathe when you’re done doesn’t mean it was a good workout,” Coval says. Effort is easy to measure and mostly beside the point; the right stimulus, repeated, is what changes anything.

The third is running the same routine since residency. Coval is more respectful of these people than you’d expect — twenty years of consistent training and portion control are, he says, the two hardest habits, already mastered. But the program that maintained you at 35 won’t carry you at 55. “What works for you now isn’t necessarily going to work for you five years from now.”

The through-line: “Consistency over time gets you the result you want.” One habit at a time, honest expectations, a program built for the actual person.

What’s actually at stake

Two of Coval’s stories stayed with us. A surgeon client held an awkward, physically impossible-feeling position in the OR for an extended stretch during an emergency — and afterward told Coval he couldn’t have done it three years earlier, and that his body didn’t feel destroyed the next day. Training was clinical capacity. And a client in his seventies got back something smaller and bigger at once: the ability to tie both his own shoes. The window for that kind of recovery is always earlier than it feels.

That’s the frame we’d offer every owner: your practice’s production ceiling, your career length, and your quality of life at exit all run through the same asset. It deserves at least the diligence you give the compressor.

The same logic runs through the building

This thinking is also why operatory ergonomics, staff workspaces, and clinical flow sit high on our site-selection criteria. A space that forces bad posture and wasted steps taxes every body in the building for a decade. The building should work for the people in it — that’s a real estate decision, made once, felt daily.

Hear the full conversation with Mike Coval of Coval Fitness on the Dentelligentsia podcast — including why the smartest person in the room still needs a coach, and his daughter’s two-word summary of his career.

And when you’re ready to make the building itself easier to work in, talk to us. Tenants and buyers only.

For more on our interview with Mike Coval, check out our article, “How Do Doctors Stay Healthy Enough To Practice A Full Career? The Physicians’ Personal Trainer.”

And follow Mike Coval on Linked In or check out the Coval Fitness website.