Level Up Your Health for Healthcare Leaders:
Capacity, Muscle, and Micro-Recovery

Transforming Healthcare Coaching Podcast — Episode 120: Level Up Your Health for Healthcare Leaders. Host Lillian Liang Emlet, MD MS CHSE CPC ELI-MP in conversation with Cory Jenks, PharmD. Published August 3, 2026.

Lillian Liang Emlet: Our health is more important than anything else. Because if we don't have capacity and we don't have the mental and physical stamina we're doing a disservice to everyone.

Cory Jenks: Doing comedy helped me be a better pharmacist. It helped me be more adaptable. It helped me listen, it helped me stay in the moment, it helped me not worry about what the next thing this person in front of me was gonna say, because the whole world is unscripted.

Lillian Liang Emlet: Welcome everybody. Thanks so much for joining us. my name is Lillian Emlet. I'm founder of Transforming Healthcare Coaching, and we're really lucky to have today with us, Dr. Cory Jenks, who is a pharmacist who has spent his career at the intersection of clinical medicine and human connection. He's practiced since 2011, I think, over a decade as a clinical pharmacist specializing in diabetes, hypertension, chronic disease, obesity care. And so couple years into his pharmacy career, he also started his side gig. He actually started also through, improv. And so he's also had a equally long career in, performing, coaching, speaking, and teaching the importance of improv to healthcare teams through his consultancy, ImprovRx, helping all clinicians pr- and providers become more adaptable, empathetic and human. And so we're gonna talk about all kinds of things today, I think, in terms of when we level up our health as healthcare leaders. it's really great that Cory in these last, couple years have actually started with his business partner, he co-hosts a podcast, the Diabetes Remission Roadmap podcast. He has a health coaching program. He takes private clients to help, people take real sustainable steps to reverse their Type 2 diabetes. And so welcome, Cory,

Cory Jenks: Thank you. I've done a lot. Holy cow, I need to give myself more credit. That's a wide range of things in 15 years since I graduated. But it's, exciting to be here and talk all things health along the spectrum there.

Lillian Liang Emlet: Yeah. Yeah, so, I think we can often, we always wonder like, "Well, how did you get here?" Obvious- so you explained how you got here, but at the same time when you've been practicing this whole entire time as a clinical pharmacist managing all these chronic diseases for thousands of patients, you went from individual one-on-one to system and scale and larger programs. And what was happening in your own life during those years? 'Cause I know like for, I mean, pharmacy is a high burnout specialty. and I'm curious, what was also simultaneously going on in these, last 15 years of your career?

Cory Jenks: Yeah. I can say when I first started my practice, I think anyone who starts a new practice, pharmacy, medicine, anything that's new, my wife's a nurse practitioner in nursing, there's a lot of unease, there's imposter syndrome. They're like, "Okay, so one day I'm not licensed and the next day I'm licensed, or one day I'm a resident, the next day I'm practicing on my own." So I mean, there's self-doubt, there's a lot of pressure, there's a lot of uncertainty, and I can tell you that the, the first year of my pharmacy practice was just, felt like white-knuckling every day. what am I supposed to do? I'll speak as a pharmacist. we're a certain type. We're pretty left brain, we're pretty by the book. So when anything would, weird or unexpected would pop up, I would be like, "But there's no guideline for that. What am I supposed to do?" And so there was a lot of... I, honestly, I was like, "Did I choose the wrong profession? What have I done? I've spent seven years training for this, and I'm not good at it and I'm not comfortable." so I think there was a lot of uncertainty, and I think the thing that was going on in my life that really changed it, you'd mentioned as in my introduction, I took an improv comedy class because I'd always liked comedy, and I think it helped on a number of levels. on one level it gave me something that was an identity that wasn't a pharmacist. So if I had a bad, rough day in practice, I could go do something else that I could be good at or have fun and not think about it. the other piece of it too was, like, the skills that I was learning like, doing comedy helped me be a better pharmacist. it helped me be more adaptable. It helped me listen, it helped me stay in the moment, it helped me not worry about what the next thing this person in front of me was gonna say, because the whole world is unscripted. So it really, it took what I had in my clinical knowledge, and it helped me actually apply it to my practice, to the human beings in front of me

Lillian Liang Emlet: I love that. improv I think has really started to grow over, the last, I want to say at least a decade. I mean, I use improv with our simulations, with our communication skills training. And so all of the actors in those training programs across the country, at least for the school of medicine, help with interviewing skills. And so there is so much to be learned even when we go in to the improv classes, which I have not yet had the luxury of doing. I know many other people who have done it in terms of just gives you the skills so that you feel like you can just, respond to whatever happens next

Cory Jenks: Yeah. Well, I think there's a lot of parallels between improv and medicine. We have... But if you can believe it, there's actually rules in improv comedy that you're supposed to follow. We don't actually always follow them, and usually those are less funny scenes. But to me, my pharmacist brain liked that. if I can just follow these rules and live in the moment and respond honestly, then I can succeed. And I... Within healthcare, we have lots of rules. There's no debating that. But within every interaction, e- everything is unknown. you don't know how people are gonna respond. And with an improv scene, you have rules, you have some guidelines, you have a time limit, usually, much like in medicine, but everything within that is unexpected. And so if you can play within those constraints, but learn to play loosely, li- live in the moment, listen and respond. And really when you think about medicine, it's about making connections with people. And on an improv stage, you're trying to connect with, yeah, your team members who you know and rehearse and trust, but you're connecting with a bunch of strangers. you're trying to make a bunch of strangers laugh, and you don't know what you're gonna say. So there's a lot of trust that you have to build immediately, with your teammates and with that audience. And so what I was able to do was get thousands of repetitions at, on the improv stage, where the stakes are very low. people laugh or they don't. Okay, they spent their $5, they didn't laugh. Not the best thing, but not the worst thing in the world. And you can take that and transfer it to a place where the stakes are high. It's literally life or death. but you don't have that freedom to rehearse the things that go wrong. you can do the simulations, but once you're in practice, like it's literally life or death. So I think we get really nervous, we get very cautious and careful. And so improv gave me the repetitions and the freedom to really fail with no consequences, so that when I was in those high-stake situations, I could fall back on the muscle memory in my brain of how to talk to people. it sounds, overly simple, but try to interact with people who make your coffee or, I mean, take care of you in healthcare. it's not always easy

Lillian Liang Emlet: Right. Right. And I think the reality, I think what you also point out that it's a skill, And so in, in terms of when we think about how those skills from fun, com- comedy, theater, on all of those other types of skills, the, the other side of our brain, the less, left side brain. you also have described the healthcare environments are really set up for failure. it's very high-stress. there's no breaks. and sometimes the food that we have is maybe unhealthy. and then sometimes people are emotionally under a lot of pressure. And because of that, you often take it out on other people, whether that be the families, the patients, or even your colleagues. And obvious- I would say that the c- collegial issues, are rampant in healthcare across professions, et cetera. And so what does it look like day-to-day, tying that in terms of how you work with people and working with the improv side of things, how this sort of changed how you practice for the day-to-day to make it at least more humane and, not a place that's gonna be able to cause your burnout?

Cory Jenks: Yeah. Well, a big piece is on an improv stage, everything's made up. And so you can have a scene that goes for five, 10 minutes with two people that you go deep into their history, their, what, whatever's going on with them. And the big key in, this is identifying what they want. the want in the scene could be, "I want you to notice my new haircut," or, "I want you to notice my new shoes." Well, when you're working with others, there's certain wants. Maybe this nurse wants to be acknowledged for all the hard work they're doing. Maybe this patient in front of you just wants to be heard for the first time. Like I can't tell you the number of people who've I've taken care of acro- across the desk from me who said, "You're the first person who's listened to me." So I think it just breaks... It just comes down to listening and identifying what they really want. Now, can we always give them what they want? No, you cannot have 100 Viagra for free. Like I've had these conversations with patients. Like there's things I cannot do for you, but why do you want these things? If you can keep asking why do you want this? And so when you're working with colleagues, and this is hard to do, like it takes a lot of practice because if someone's rude to you, you wanna be rude. " Hey, you can't disrespect me." Why are they acting this way? Why are they so short? If we can keep asking why and understand what do they want, do they need a break? Do they want to be acknowledged? Do they want a raise? We can't always give them what they want, but if you can understand what they actually do want, we can work through that lens to get to a better place. If not, there's no perfect healthcare utopia where everything's happy and rainbows and sunshine, but it's so bad that if you can make it a little less bad and identify what the people around you, the ones you take care of, the ones you work with, what they want, it can make things make a lot more sense and make it easier.

Lillian Liang Emlet: That's a great leadership lesson right there. I mean, the reality is often every year as we, we renegotiate sort of our role on the team and the role of the organization, understanding our own whys and really unpacking it for ourselves so that we know how to negotiate with clarity. And then also as a leader, helping people get to understanding their why. For like, why should they volunteer their time for projects for the greater good? to really understand, like, how are their strengths gonna be able to be, best leveraged for the team is, something that, you know, like what you're describing is really useful. Whether you're a leader, whether you're a frontline, whether you're new, whether you're a student, all of these things are useful, in general. Knowing yourself and then also knowing, how to bring that out in other people.

Cory Jenks: Yeah. and I think from a leadership perspective too, identifying like what's the mission and why are we here? And also a big part of improv is just acknowledging in reality. And sometimes that reality, like the funniest scenes are when reality is absurd. And the truth is, like our realities are absurd. Like I can tell you some of the best times I've had supervisors, bosses, are when they are given some ridiculous thing that they ask us to do, and instead of being like, " We must do this very important thing," they're like, "Listen, this is not what I would've chosen to do, but we have to do it. If there's any way that I can make it less bad for you, let me know." Like you just acknowledged that this kind of sucks. and so how can we make it less sucky? Like we have to do it, but can we do this in a way that makes it a little more enjoyable or works better with our workflow? And like sometimes that's all you can ask. And now, and as the, that employee, you can say, "Well I just want to not have to do this." Well, igno- the reality is they're being told by someone well above them that they have to do this thing. Like in my book Permission to Care, I give an example when I worked retail pharmacy and they asked us to go out into the aisles of a big box chain, and ask people to transfer their prescriptions to us. And just like coldly ask, " Hey, do you... Oh, you're looking at toys. Well, do you have prescriptions? Well, let me tell you, the pharmacy, you can get $20 in a gift card if you transfer it." And so I would just go... and I had a great pharmacist who was just like, "Go out, ask if they can find something. If it works to work it in, great. If not, just tell me you talked to them and we'll mark it on our little checklist." And we did that, and it was actually terrible because "Can you actually help me find where this is?" I'm like, "I don't. I work in the pharmacy. good luck."

Lillian Liang Emlet: right.

Cory Jenks: So

Lillian Liang Emlet: Right. Oh my goodness. It's so interesting the stories that you, of experiences you've collected over time of how these things show up in the very interesting workplaces. and so these workplaces can, are really hard for us to find time to do self-care. So, I think with our, the title of this, talk was supposed to be about like how do we level up our own health? Because our health is more important than anything else. Because if we don't have capacity and we don't have the mental and physical stamina to get through our 12-hour shifts, it's, we're doing a disservice to everyone. And so, caring for your own health is actually a service to other people, and it's actually not selfish. And I'm curious how that resonates for you and ways that you can explain to other healthcare professionals why that is.

Cory Jenks: Yeah. Well, it resonates because on a number of levels. taking care of thousands of people in... My job as a clinical pharmacist, I worked in primary care, so I got to have conversations with people. I wasn't just at a pharmacy counter handing out pills. Just for context of, like, how is this guy having all these conversations when retail pharmacies are so busy? I w- did not work in a retail pharmacy for that long. So the seeing just thousands of people whose health deteriorate and their families depend on them, their businesses depend on them, and they can't be there for them. the number of spouses who took care of all, people that couldn't cook dinner because their spouse literally cooked dinner for 50 years, and then they're sick. so but they let their health go because they had to take care of others. I mean, I talk about it with my wife, she's a nurse. She was an AC nurse before she became a nurse practitioner, and we call it the martyr syndrome of "Oh, I can't leave my patient. I can't go to the bathroom. I can't do this." Great, so you're gonna burn yourself out and be so sick that you can't show up and it's, if you take a three-minute break, well, you won't do that, but now you're gonna have to take a three-day break because you developed some sort of, some problem. And so when we show up at... And I'm gonna not- every place is hard. Healthcare is hard. I'm not saying that you need to take a seven-day vacation every two days of shift. this is not reality. But when you can't show up reasonably well, the people you take care of suffer, the people you work with suffer. And so if I had to explain it to anybody is if you wanna be your best, you have to take care of yourself. And at a more basic human level, you do this job to earn an income. If you can't do your job, you can't support whoever you need to support. And so you, we... This works on a number of levels. And this goes back to identifying the want. Some people are there to serve others. Some people are there for the paycheck. Whatever it is, you have a reason to be there. And if you don't take care of yourself, your reason goes away. And so how do we do this with 12-hour shifts, with working long hours, with stressful conditions? And I think for me, what I've found is that little moments can really regenerate you a lot. w- if we need an hour to go exercise, we're probably not gonna get it, but if we can take a five-minute walk outside in sunshine, that will rejune- re- if you've been, like, nonstop all day, five minutes feels great. And we were just talking before about having kids. Oh my gosh. When I get a 10-minute nap in the middle of a day when my wife gives me 10 minutes, I come back as such a better dad and husband. like a 15-minute mat- nap feels like a weekend vacation when you have not had any breaks. So I think we try to be too perfect and try to make these conditions so great to do it, but I think micro recovery, I call it micro recovery, like a five-minute walk, put on a favorite song, do a set of squats every hour if you're sitting all day. there's a lot of like tactical things you, we could talk about, but I think first getting the mindset that like it doesn't have to be perfect and doing what seems like very little can be hugely beneficial.

Lillian Liang Emlet: That's a great reminder to me for today, 'cause today is my post-call day, so I'm after a night shift. And so I'm always a little bit, wonky afterwards, and so this is I feel always doubly worse because I don't get to do my whole hour of yoga. And so this is a great reminder, so thank you for this, because I will go do my squats and I, or my chair, and I will feel a lot better because I still got that in, and so your health coaching work, with your practice actually now centers on a lot of muscle-based approaches is what I understand. As you've said I think before that squat breaks taken through the day, done consistently, can move your blood sugar more than a single 30-minute walk, and I had not known that. and so I guess I'm curious, what other, things do you talk about with, the people that you help with their diabetes and their management? just these little micro, restorations that you're talking about, that, like a kill two birds with one stone. You got your movement in, you got your muscle strength training in, and now this is not only helping your mental and physical health. Tell us more

Cory Jenks: Yeah. So I now, co-run a diabetes coaching service that helps people reduce their blood sugar and reduce their reliance on medications. And I think my view on the world, and this is just years of practice and learning, and is that type 2 diabetes is, we can almost call it a muscle disease because 70, 80% of our glucose storage as glycogen is in our skeletal muscle. So, as we age, one of the risk factors for type 2 diabetes is aging. Well, it's not just that you're older, it's what happens when you age and you don't intervene with strength training and proper nutrition, is you lose muscle. And so when you lose muscle capacity, think of it like a gas tank that's shrinking. And so whatever you consume, there's less place to put it, or an overstuffed suitcase. You have nowhere to put that excess energy. Spills into your blood as high blood sugar. And so what we have found is when someone's diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, they're told to eat better and exercise more, which is super vague and not helpful. people know, like what junk food is. People know what exercise is. And so I think a lot of times people are like, "I'm just gonna do a bunch of cardio and burn it all off," which is, we can talk about the micro interventions with cardiovascular stuff. But muscle is so powerful because when you build muscle, you basically build better capacity to get rid of glucose out of your blood. I mean, there's these things called GLUT4 transporters that can get sugar out of your blood independent of insulin. So for someone who's insulin resistant, if you build muscle and utilize it, you can get glucose out of your blood. And there was a study showing that three-minute squatting breaks taken every 45 minutes, ten times across the day, helped to lower blood sugar better than a single 30-minute continuous walk. And so I think that shows the power of utilizing muscle appropriately. Now, am I gonna tell someone, "Don't go for a 30-minute walk?" No. But if you're only doing walking or cardiovascular work for blood sugar, you're missing a huge lever you can pull when it comes to not in just improving blood sugar, but if you're really looking to put this thing in remission and to reduce your medication need, and the sort of thing that I dangle in front of people is it's a blood sugar cheat code. So if someday the big thing we say is, " Do you wanna go to Thanksgiving and not feel like the special person who's everyone's like, ' Well, they have diabetes, they can't have the pumpkin pie. We don't give them the pota- potato.'" If you want to be able to handle more glucose and carbs coming into your body, then if you have more muscle, you can shove it away, but if you have more muscle and use it. So I think that's been a real enlightening thing that people whether they work with us or we do lots of, live webinars, we have our podcast, we have YouTube videos, is they "Oh, I've never heard about muscle being important for blood sugar." And it's important for blood sugar. I mean, muscle's important as we age to be capable to do things. But, I've really kinda taken a, not gonna say contrarian approach, but like just a different lens on blood sugar. And so that's why we talk about muscle being so important, in our program.

Lillian Liang Emlet: I love that. I do, follow Dr. Gabrielle Lyon and all of the protein and the muscle sort of things. And at the same time, it's hard. It's really hard. especially as you get into your 40s and your 50s, you're in a leadership position, you often have very administrative roles, you're in a bunch of meetings all day long. And so if you're in a healthcare executive, oftentimes you're not necessarily doing things that are as physically active as when we were younger working, again, the, the physical, shift along the clinical floors. You're at least doing steps all the time. and so if you've let your health sort of slip or exercise regimen or strength regimen sort of slip, what's the one small thing that they could do in general, the, easiest add-on aside from like the squats,

Cory Jenks: Okay. If you can find 15 minutes twice a week, we can build you muscle. there's some very interesting data showing, that when you do... certain cadence of workout and this is getting really in the weeds, but, you do six to seven movements, but you do them, and I'm gonna demonstrate on video here. Say we're doing, an overhead press. We're gonna, I'm talking at a normal rate, but I'm going in slow motion. Like, when we do these very slow movements, getting to a place of muscle failure within a minute to a minute and a half, you get a weight, a tension, a resistance band. You get to failure, and you do this twice a week with the different movements. That will build muscle. and so there's, if you like muscle, Dr. Ben Bocchicchio has been doing this. He's a PhD. He's been doing this for, over 50 years. He's got a great book called 15 Minutes to Fitness. When I learned about this, I did not wanna believe it because I was always like, "I'm in the gym for an hour. I love working out." And I still enjoy it, but as we talk about, you get older, you have some kids, you get a leadership position, that your time shrinks. And so since about 2020, I've been doing this. I, and I do, we give it to our clients. I do it myself, 15 minutes twice a week, strength workout, and I have had dex- And I'm 39, so I'm hitting the place where you should be slowing down or getting... I don't believe it anymore. I just choose to ignore the idea, like, oh, 40 is old. It's not. I'm in denial. but I've been doing this for five or six years, and I'll get a DEXA scan or an InBody scan every couple years, and I keep gaining muscle mass. So it's so if you had to move one lever, if you've let your fitness slip, I think finding 15 minutes twice a week. And if you don't have a 15-minute block, you can do these two minutes at a time. And if you don't have a gym membership, you can get some resistance bands. You can get a pull-up bar. You can go to the park and do, There, there's ways to fit this in. A- and I think, you asked for one thing. I'll say this, this particular way o- of working out The, the, the one mindset shift that I think that you need to make is that we live in unprecedented time of abundance when it comes to food and distractions and responsibilities that are different than we had thousands of years ago when we were fighting for survival. And I would rather be here. I like central air. I live in Tucson. I love air conditioning. I love to be able to stream things on TV. I occasionally will use DoorDash, but I, we don't use a lot like that. But, we have things at our fingertips that are unreal. Like you... And if you go to every meeting, there's cookies or something at every meeting. These are unprecedented times, and we need to have unprecedented interventions. And if it means you look silly doing squats a few times a day in front of your colleagues or doing a wall sit or doing a walking meeting instead of sitting at your desk or, I'm not doing it right now 'cause it would be distracting, but My wife and I have a walking pad, for our standup desk. All right? You have to sneak these things in, and you have to be intentional because our lives will just not happen with our lives. So that was a lot of more than a single thing, but, you got me on the soapbox there, so

Lillian Liang Emlet: Oh, no, that was really wonderful because I actually... So you answered the question that I always wondered, 'cause I like to do a lot of light, exercises that are not, probably like more core and, lighter, higher rep. What you're arguing for is the fact that you should do, to fatigue potentially. So more weight, not the amount of time. It's not the time.

Cory Jenks: muscle failure and pro- progress- progressively overloading your body. And it's... I will say this, and I will be honest with our watchers and listeners. I do this workout Monday and Friday, and every Monday and every Friday morning at about 5:15, I dread. My first exercise is pull-ups, and I hate it every time. And it's only, I literally do it for a minute to a minute 10 seconds, and I do these slow pull-ups, and I dread it every time because it's hard. But then you do it and it's done, and in 15 minutes... I didn't wanna believe that it could work, but it does. And so, and even full disclosure, I've added a Wednesday kind of coached workout, at a gym here as well f- which, in the last year, which is just a sort of a fun thing my wife and I have done. But my wife is 40, and she has put on a ton of muscle in the last year, doing, two workouts a week, doing some rucking with a rucksack, using some kettlebells, and tr- staying up late with our three-year-old who doesn't sleep. So it is possible, it just takes intentionality. And I think if you wanna get to a deeper why or want, you wanna be there for your team if you're a leader. You wanna be there for your family. You wanna be there for your patients. When you show up strong, you show up strong, and you're there, better physically, and mentally, and emotionally

Lillian Liang Emlet: I love that. And so, the reality is you've given us a lot of hope and realization that it is possible even when we're leading really busy lives to be able to build strength, build the foundation, in the end take care of your, sugar. And actually, I would also argue that, feeling stronger physically does help with the, both the mental, along with the physical, like you already alluded to, in terms of that you feel stronger and therefore you have the capacity to be stronger, in this crazy world that we live in. How can people get, work with you, bring you in to speak, workshops, take advantage of the education you have, for their teams or their, family?

Cory Jenks: Great. Well, if you go to my website, coryjenks.com, you can see my name. It's C-O-R-Y, so no E. My parents were teachers, couldn't afford to buy the vowel. cor- coryjenks.com is where you can find me. I'm on LinkedIn. like you say, it's, one of my favorite places, so I think, LinkedIn's personable. You can see me, you can send me a direct message, see my face. th- the podcast is called The Diabetes Remission Roadmap. And so from there you can, we have an Instagram, and a YouTube, we're the Diabetes Remission Partners. So that's where you can see some of our content, listen to it. but yeah, if you contact me directly, I can certainly point you in the right direction as far as working with me, coming in to speak, and I love speaking about the communication, the improv side of things. I love giving these metabolic health talks. I just gave one last week to a, a local business here, that was a health-focused business, and it was very fun and engaging to, to see people, the aha moments, And honestly, the anger at what we've been fed, both physically and just emotionally of, what's normal and why we have, such a terrible food system, and how it takes a lot of intention to eat in a way that's gonna nourish your body. And I got news for you. last night my son made... He's eight and he loves cooking. He made biscuits. I ate them. he loves make- we make homemade ice cream. I eat it. So I'm not just sitting here saying, "Yeah, I just eat nothing but protein shakes and kale." No, I live life. it's not every meal, but there's a way to build a body that can ha- as you say, have the capacity to have those moments where you enjoy it, but also provide the baseline fuel to take care of your day-to-day responsibilities.

Lillian Liang Emlet: I love that. I love how you've, you are willing to pour back into people with the resilience and the flexibility that people need from, a interpersonal perspective and also from a physical, perspective, with your practices. So it's wonderful to have you here on the show. And here at Transforming, we really feel that we can transform healthcare one person at a time. And so we like to bring onto our show the people who we think are being change-makers and thought leaders, and reminding healthcare professionals that they are the biggest asset to all their patients, their family, their communities. And so we take care of healthcare professionals so that you can take care of everybody else. Thank you everyone for joining us Thank you, Dr. Jenks, for, being on the show, and enjoy your day,