My Journey

We all have a moment in our lives when we lose our feeling of invulnerability or invincibility. When we realize that our body is eventually going to fail and we have to take better care of ourselves if we desire to have a high quality of life throughout our future.

For some people, this moment happens after an unexpected medical issue, such as a heart attack or cancer diagnosis, for others it could be a major injury, or it could simply be a progressive increase in pain and decrease in function throughout life until a threshold is reached and we suddenly realize things are not like they used to be. We are confronted with our own mortality.

For me, this moment happened at age 7 when I developed a bone eating disease and was faced with the prognosis of never being able to walk again. After a number of surgeries and about a year of rehab, I was left with a fused hip, but I did learn to walk again. As is often the case, the most challenging periods of our lives often define who we become.

In my case, I learned at a rather young age that my body was a finite resource and I needed to take care of it if it was going to allow me to live the type of life I wanted to. I also learned how healing movement and exercise could be for improving function and decreasing pain, not just developing a better looking body.

Side note: Nutrition, recovery, flexibility, stress and other things are huge factors too. I’m simply not focusing on them in this message. They are all part of the bigger picture and the programs I create for my clients however.

Of course, it took another couple decades for me to develop the knowledge to really understand how to do this and make it an intentional practice within my workouts and with my clients. Like everyone else, made a ton of mistakes working out when I was younger and let my ego dictate my training more than doing what was best for my body.

Fortunately, I learned from my mistakes and continue to grow as a person and a trainer. I learned more about myself and my clients and moved passed simply training muscles and movements to retraining how our brain controls our movement patterns (perhaps the greatest key to having a healthy and functional body) Eventually, I developed what I now call my Health First Approach to Fitness.

As a result of my 20+ years of experience in a variety of areas of health and fitness, I now have a system to help others learn to avoid and when necessary correct so many of the mistakes we make when we are younger. It’s important to know these mistakes are not our fault. We are simply never told the long-term implications of how the things we do affect our bodies or how our bodies naturally change and develop as we age.

The truth is the human body is amazing in many ways, but some of the things it naturally does for our benefit actually cause some of the most detrimental chronic muscle and joint problems over time. Our body often does things subconsciously to actually prevent us from knowing there is a problem until the problem gets so bad that it can’t be hidden anymore.

While our bodies do naturally decrease in function as we age, so many of the things people think of as “natural declines“ or “normal pains of getting older“ are not normal at all. Very often they are symptoms of bad habits we have unconsciously developed throughout life. Or they are symptoms of lifestyle, such as sitting without moving for hours every day (low back issues) or holding a cell phone or tablet for hours every day (anterior shoulder issues)

The list goes on and on, but the good news is we actually have a lot more control over these types of issues and “declines“ than we realize. We are simply never told what to do or shown how to create better habits to prevent these negative things from happening. As people eventually discover and I warn you, this can be a hard realization to accept at first:

So many of the things that cause us some of our greatest chronic problems and pains could have been prevented with minor interventions when we were younger. I have worked so many people who made comments such as, “I wish someone had told me this years ago, it could have made such a difference with my (whatever condition they are currently struggling with)“

The good news is that wherever you are now and whatever you are struggling with, your quality of life can improve significantly. Sometimes with just some small changes to your routine that you might never have considered before. It does take dedication and consistency to create healthy habits, but I have never had anyone tell me the results weren’t worth the effort.

If you are someone who is just starting to experience functional declines or increases in pain or still feels great and wants to remain fit and functional throughout your life, my approach is even easier to implement.

Another aspect of my particular journey is my body has been different from the norm for a very long time, so I have had to modify a lot of my training and created many exercises that are not the standard variations, but are right for me. I also do this with my clients, because everyone really is different.

We all have some physical and movement dysfunction and nobody is completely symmetrical or has perfect posture. We each have unique challenges and goals and my methods reflects that. By the way, I approach nutrition and other aspects of health and fitness from the same perspective.

My clients have different nutrition programs, different recovery and warm-up routines, different things they do outside of training with me. In my opinion, that is how it should be as I am not trying to make everyone into a copy of myself. I desire for each person to be the best version of themselves.

As for my personal journey now, I can say I still have many challenges, physical and otherwise, but I am not stuck trying to survive as I have been for so much of my life. I am currently 45 and able to perform activities and be engaged in life in ways that I could not even have conceived of in my 20s or 30s.

Life truly can be so much more than we often believe. I invite you into a collaborative process where I help you create a future that you are excited about and that allows you to be fully engaged in life. The life you thought you had to leave behind can still be a reality.