How do you want to move and feel in your body when you’re 90? Do you want to be able to get up and down from the floor with ease? Do you want to run, jump, crawl, and climb trees? Do you want to be able to pick up grandchildren and great grandchildren? Can you do these things now?
Personal Training as Part of Movement Therapy
My approach to personal training and coaching is to develop long-term, lasting results by focusing on creating a lifestyle and paradigm shift around how you feel in your body, how you move, how you engage in movement, and how you develop movement skills that will last a lifetime. Instead of unsustainable short-term gains, we will developing a long-term way of moving and being in the world.
Play!
I love working with clients who want to participate in learning how to move and feel better in their body. I don’t focus on weight loss, and I don’t work clients out to exhaustion at the expense of healthy form. In fact, I’m less concerned about “working out” … period. Why would we want to spend eight hours at work and then engage in an hour of something else with work in the name?
Movement is supposed to be playful and fun. It should be less “I have to do this” and more “I get to do this” or ”I have an opportunity to do this.” My goal is for every personal training and coaching session to be so much more than just a “workout.” I want the movements we study to make their way into your everyday life. I want the skills of movement you practice, develop, and hone in your sessions with me to become the physical expression of who you are and how you move in the world. I want you to develop the confidence to explore your world with child-like curiosity, no longer being barricaded to the groomed trails and sidewalks of the so-called “civilized” world. I want you to have the movement skills to engage nature, bathe in mountain streams, climb trees, and witness gorgeous sunsets from off the beaten trail.
In my movement therapy program, we first focus on movement restoration, literally restoring lost movement ability from years of sitting and moving poorly. Then we add in skill development, learning how to do cool stuff with your body. Finally, as you become more skillful, we can start conditioning those super fun skills in order to get stronger, faster, better.
But I Want Aggressive Workouts
I certainly enjoy a really hard workout. They do have their time and place in my program. But you have to earn the right to work out hard. FIRST you have to learn how to move properly!
There are a number of alternatives to my movement therapy approach. With most mainstream fitness programs, the paradigm is all about conditioning. People use bootcamps, personal training, and fitness classes to squeeze a weekly workout into their busy schedule. In the quest of burning the most calories in the shortest time, many people find a high-intensity workout with someone whose sole purpose is to push them past their limits.
The danger of this approach is that within the first five minutes of the workout, you’re already so fatigued that your form breaks down. As a result, you spend the next 55 minutes teaching your body how to move poorly at high intensity. It’s the perfect recipe for pain and injury. We’ve normalized the scenes from TV weight loss “reality” shows — contestants crying and vomiting into trash cans, with a sideshow of cheerleading and breakthrough, all edited with inspirational music. If they can do it, we can do it, right?
While these moments can seem inspiring on television, they present a rather unrealistic route to becoming the healthiest version of yourself — and, worse, they can and often do lead to injury, discouragement, and major setback. If this is what you are looking for, I respectfully suggest that you look somewhere else. What I teach is completely different!
What to Expect
During my personal training and coaching sessions, we begin with a check-in and some restorative movement, and we assess any struggles you’re experiencing in your body. Then we’ll begin learning new movement skills, focusing on doing it well. After a few weeks, we move into conditioning. As each session comes to a close, we’ll come back into some restorative movement.
With any new skills, I’ll have you video me performing the movements and send you a YouTube link, so that you can reference them as needed throughout your week. I will also create a personalized exercise program to help guide you through your week. The value of our sessions is less about the hour that you’re with me and more about incorporating the coaching and movement tools into your daily life.
Our goal is change — to create a new movement paradigm. My goal is to get you moving 60-120 minutes a day, cumulatively, in a way that doesn’t take away from what you already do. We want to add in, without taking away.
These personal training sessions work best as part of a larger movement practice, something I call “movement therapy.” While any movement is beneficial, a weekly session in isolation will create a far smaller change than an everyday practice, which is why I focus on coaching and consulting for implementing these movements into your daily routines.
Our goal is to improve the natural movement of your life, so the real results happen outside the gym, when the work makes its way into how you exist in your body. Each session is a beginning, one small impactful part of your larger movement journey toward a greater quality of life.
By embracing this change, you will not only change how you move… you will change your life.