My Fitness Journey
It’s no mystery to me why so many people, athletes included, have movement challenges, injuries to overcome, and a desire to train smart, not only harder. I’ve experienced all of these myself, and after decades of struggling, I have found a methodology to address them.
Like me, my clients tend to be open-minded yet skeptical and are always looking for a better way. They are also unusual in that they have not given up hope of finding answers even when they are not immediately forthcoming. They recognize that they can and should be able to move better, perform better, and continue to do so for years if not decades to come.
My approach to fitness and health in general is designed to offer you those possibilities.
I have had to work hard to get my performance to where it is today. Have I been stronger in the past? Yes. Have I had greater cardiovascular conditioning? Yes. Have I recovered quicker? Yes. At different times in my life, I excelled in one of these areas. The difference today is that I am much more balanced among the three. In getting to this point, I made mistakes. At times, I allowed my ego to get in the way, followed the trends, or ignored signs from my body. However, I have learned from those mistakes and the mistakes of others so that I don’t repeat them, and I like to pass on this wisdom to my clients whenever possible.
I have always been active, starting from early childhood. Whether it was organized sports or just playing around the house and in the neighboring communities, I was always on the go.
When I started college, I became more serious about fitness as I worked towards a bachelor’s degree in Health and Physical Education. To gain experience, I began working at a local YMCA fitness center. Here I began lifting heavy: squats, deadlifts, bench—all the traditional exercises. Likely from my years of running around, I excelled at the lower body exercises; however, due to my generally lean frame and longer wingspan, I had rather poor leverage training the upper body. I got stronger, but I had tremendous difficulty building muscle much less adding any weight.
At this time in college, I also became serious about cycling. Before I knew it, I was averaging 200 to 250-plus miles per week. I would think nothing of waking up and taking off for a 60 to 100-mile ride. Aerobically, I was crushing it. While my lungs and legs loved it, my upper body started losing the little mass it had.
In hindsight, training that hard wasn’t the brightest decision. I didn’t realize that full-time school on top of working 20 to 30 hours per week on top of all that exercise would prove to be so destructive. As if that weren’t enough, I had a car accident during this time where the tree won.
It all came to a head one morning when my body said, “No, I will not continue this insane behavior!” My entire neuromuscular system went into a defensive mode in protest.
How bad was it? The X-rays said a lot:
Ilium (pelvic bones) were rotated in opposite directions
Lumbar spine had too little curve with some scoliosis
Thoracic kyphosis (too much curve)
Loss of most cervical curve while adding a lower cervical rotation
Massage didn’t help. Chiropractic work along with a significant reduction in activity levels helped manage symptoms but did little to address the cause.
After getting married, I made a career detour away from fitness and entered “Corporate America.” While it was not the best move, I did learn valuable lessons regarding not only what I wanted to do but also what I did NOT want to become. In the early 2000s, an opportunity presented itself, and I returned to the fitness arena as a personal trainer in a recently opened fitness and wellness center. At this time, I became a homeowner, and I jumped willingly into landscaping projects (which I still enjoy greatly).
Considering my history, while I had been managing my physical “weak links,” I had never really understood the inner workings of what happened nor corrected them. I knew what I could do without issue and what exacerbated my symptoms and generally stayed within those limits. Periodic chiropractic work and massage were essentially band-aids.
Did I mention landscaping projects? Unwittingly, I pushed myself harder physically and beyond what my body was able to compensate for. The physical and structural problems of old started manifesting.
What didn’t work? My degree and certifications didn’t help. Neither my fellow trainers nor the center’s fitness director had answers. I had no choice but to investigate on my own. What I discovered, or I should say who I discovered, was Paul Chek and an article entitled “The Inner Unit.” Now it made sense! I knew what was missing, what went wrong. My core was dysfunctional. I am not referring to the outer muscles, the glamorous, fashionable six-pack muscles. I am referring to the inner ones, those deep, misunderstood muscles that stabilize the ribcage to the pelvis via the spine. These muscles are the foundation for efficient, effective movement. Mine were not working correctly. What I didn’t know was exactly what to do about it.
Before I knew it, I was traveling to New York City and Toronto, Canada, taking Paul’s CHEK Practitioner and Holistic Lifestyle Coach courses. I not only learned how to assess core function, but more importantly, I learned how to correct the dysfunction. Even better, the tools I gained integrated core function into movement, and combined they turned my life around. Physically, I was able to correct and strengthen weak links from almost fifteen years prior.
I was not only feeling better, I was moving better. I was building retaining walls, walkways, patios, and flower beds. I was taking down trees and splitting wood—cords of wood. The body is truly amazing. Give it what it needs and reduce or eliminate blocking factors, and otherwise unobtainable objectives are suddenly in reach.
The spinal weak links that were created by my early pattern of overdoing things are still present to varying degrees, but it takes a heckuva lot more stress to push me beyond my limits. Now I recognize why my body gets unhappy, and most important, I have tools at my disposal to handle the situation.
Looking back, I have come to realize that I had been chronically underweight most of my life. It is only recently that I have corrected chronic metabolic imbalances, and my body responded. I literally put on twenty pounds, mostly muscle, in less than a year without trying. It wasn’t my intention, but my body on its own started manifesting what it should have been all along.
What I have realized is that training smarter is always going to win in the long run over training harder. Longevity is of great importance to me. I plan to live a long life while retaining as much independence as possible both in terms of cognitive ability and mobility. Sacrificing my physical body now for ego-driven reasons, such as how I look in the mirror or how others see me, is unimportant and counterproductive to me.
Training smarter embraces the realization that the body understands movement, not exercises. While I had become stronger in the gym as a young adult, I was not necessarily able to apply that strength to the actual activities I was performing around the house or in my daily life. I’ve found that there is very little carryover from the work one does on the machines found in just about every gym and the ability to excel in a sport or activity; these machines train virtually no relevant movement pattern. There is nothing at the gym that will mimic picking up a 80 to 100 pound stone off the ground, walking it across the yard, and placing it on a wall over and over again for multiple days in a row. There is no machine that will directly allow me to split wood more effectively. And yet, it is far more demanding to do either of these activities properly than it is to move a heavy weight stack or perform a multitude of reps on a weight machine. The same goes for virtually any sport you can think of. Building strength is one thing; the ability to apply it functionally is something else entirely. Applying this revelation has advanced my own fitness levels tremendously.
I am not saying gyms and the machines found within are bad or that no one should ever perform traditional bodybuilding exercises. But the work I do with my clients revolves around understanding the root causes of movement challenges and chronic injuries and resolving those issues. To overcome movement challenges, it is always necessary to perform isolating movements prior to integrating them into full body compound movements and before adding external forces and loads to the equation. In the scheme of things fitness related, there is no such thing as a bad exercise; there is only poorly prescribed exercise.
My experience and education have allowed me to overcome significant movement obstacles. I have helped clients do the same, and I believe strongly that I can also help you.