My Personal Journey - From Exercise as an Activity to Career

I was an athlete through my entire childhood almost always playing multiple sports. I started doing exercises at home to change the way I look when I was around 8. I’m not sure if I was trying to look like He-Man, Batman, Superman, GI Joe, or some other idea of what a “man” was supposed to look like (maybe my sister’s Ken doll). I did mostly push-ups and sit-ups.

When I was 13 I got my first weights and started lifting weight for performance as well as aesthetics. I suffered several sports injuries during high school. In college I continued to lift weights and really started to put on noticeable amounts of muscle. After graduation I struggled to find a job and continued to drink like I was in college. This is about when I really fell in love with the gym. I replaced drinking with powerlifting.

Powerlifting quickly became all I cared about. Most of the free time I had was either spent in the gym getting as strong as I could or learning as much as I could about the sport. When I wasn’t consumed by either of those activities I was either working or eating. Both were just fuel for my lifting, as was my new found passion for yoga which seemed to accelerate my recovery and provide some balance for the aches and stiffness that seemed to come with powerlifting. After competing and setting reasonable personal bests in the lifts (496 lb squat, 265 lb bench press, and 484 lb deadlift) I began to branch out in to other activities such as BJJ and hiking though I still cherished my time in the gym.

I made adjustments to my diet and lost a significant amount of weight (about 40 lbs) and began to think about competing again at a lighter weight class. Shortly after this shift in priorities I got in to a motorcycle accident. I smashed my sacrum and broke several bones in my hand. It took me a year just to be done with surgeries and any thoughts of competing in powerlifting were gone.

I did the physical therapy and was able to slowly get back in to lifting weights. I quickly realized that the traditional barbell lifts were no longer an option for me. I had a session of squats with what was a relatively light weight for me at the time, all the lifts went well and I had no reason to suspect I had injured anything though I woke up the next morning and was in terrible pain. I struggled to even put my socks on. I gave up on barbell lifts and bought a kettlebell.

The kettlebell was great. It allowed me to get in great shape, it was portable and I could bring it on vacation train at home, and was challenging enough to scratch the same itch that powerlifting did. I read a book by Pavel Tsatsouline of StrongFirst called “Simple and Sinister”. This book detailed a program that consisted of two lifts, the kettlebell swing and the Turkish Get-up. It worked. It was both simple in it’s program and exercise selection and sinister in it’s ability to get you in shape and expose your weak points. I was hooked. I had only one injury during this time and it wasn’t (directly) related to my lifting. I was opening a window and something “went” in my back. For weeks I couldn’t take a full breath without pain. The first days were the worst, I could barely even lay down and breathe without pain. After about two months I started to lift again and everything seemed fine but then it happened again. More time off. Then I lowered the weight I used and started lifting again. That seemed to work and I didn’t have the pain in my back, other than the aches and stiffness I had grown accustomed to.

Then I got in to hunting which required a lot of walking, often with a heavy pack on my back. Then I started to notice knee pain that I hadn’t had before. Some of my old injuries seemed to coming back to haunt me. I thought more strength would be the answer. It wasn’t and I reluctantly gave up kettlebell lifting as well, leaving me with bodyweight exercises and yoga. I stretched everything. Got as flexible as I could. If strength wasn’t the answer then flexibility must be… It wasn’t. The pain continued and I was still haunted by whatever happened to my back.

After my father died I had to forget about injuries. There was work to do. The lawn needed mowing. Furniture to remove. Boxes to pack and store. Tools and equipment to move. In short, lots of heavy things needed to be moved. And the dog still needed to walk and my job still needed to be done. By the grace of God I managed all the work without any injury but the stress of that year between the grief, the packing and moving, and the not knowing if my back would hold out and I’d be able to breathe took me to my limit and I was taking it out on those around me, mostly my dog.

I quit my job with two things on my mind. Repair my relationship with my dog, which required a lot of training (more of me than him). And fix my back, which eventually lead me to training.

I started with diet. I had noticed that after some meals my back would hurt which was often related to bloating and intestinal inflammation. I learned quite a bit more about diet and it did reduce flare-ups in my back, as well as the more general aches that were always in the background. I quickly seemed to hit the limit of how good I could get my diet in terms of pain management and I continued my search.

I started taking corrective exercise classes and learning about that and anatomy gave me hope. I thought I was knowledgable about lifting after 20 years of training but just a couple courses opened my eyes to world of exercise I knew nothing about. I was also in need of a job so I signed up for a course to become a certified personal trainer. I figured that I was learning so much that I didn’t even know existed that others would probably benefit from the knowledge as well. I took more courses than a care to list covering topics from the lymphatic system to stretching with a flexible dowel (StickMobility) as well as more standard anatomy and exercise courses.

Then GOATA Locomotion Systems had their first classes. The system had been around for some time and I dabbled in some of their exercises but never gave it enough attention to really figure it out. The first course was free so I figure “why not” and signed up for their first class. I quickly realized the times of that first class wouldn’t work with my schedule and switch in the third class which started a week later. I’m glad I did, I wouldn’t have wanted to miss a moment of any of the classes. Their understanding of human movement somehow made perfect sense, changed everything I knew about exercise, and didn’t contradict anything else I had learned. What really sold me on GOATA were the exercises. They seemed so simple, being based off of infant development, a baby could literally do the exercises. Yet they were powerful. My body somehow knew these exercises were exactly what was missing from my rehabilitation, after every injury but especially my motorcycle accident. After the first time I did the exercises I moved with a lightness that I could only remember in childhood. That was all the convincing I needed to take the deep dive in the their level 2 course.

The GOATA level 2 course didn’t disappoint and continue to put me in positions that just felt “right”. By the end I knew the goal of training was within the GOATA framework. Despite that my education still felt incomplete and I hadn’t made much progress in developing confidence in my back, though my knee pain had all but disappeared.

I signed up for Functional Range Conditioning (FRC) from Functional Anatomy Seminars (FAS) and started working at a gym that offered bootcamp classes and some personal training around the same time. FRC gave me a deeper understanding of how to create the range of motion needed to perform GOATA exercises and working in the gym gave me an outlet to finally practice training people other than myself.

While FRC opened the door to understanding how to create range of motion and how strength was what separated mobility from flexibility, even when combined with what I learned from GOATA it didn’t feel like I knew enough to continue to make progress in rehabilitating my back although I had definitely come a long way by this point. I also struggled in applying what all I had learned with the clients that I had at the gym, both of whom had serious injuries and surgeries and despite having completed physical therapy still had severe movement limitations and abnormalities. Physical therapy seemed able to return people to some level of function but was limited in providing full rehabilitation. This was echoed in what I learned in FRC and more so as I continued with the Functional Anatomy Seminars.

I continued my education with a seminar on movement and range of motion assessment (Functional Range Assessment or FRA from FAS), as well as BodyReading, another assessment practice from Anatomy Trains. These gave me more insight in to how to understand movement limitations and then apply what I knew to correct them.

Learning from Anatomy Trains lead me to myofascial release. Which was something I had dabbled in but never fully understood or correctly applied. I took a course that combined the Anatomy Trains view of the body with one of the best methods I know of for myofascial release from Tune Up Fitness. Combining this with what I knew from FRC allowed me to take another step towards rehabilitation.

Around this time I decided it was time to train independently from the gym I was in and had an opportunity to train in SnapFitness which would give me access to more equipment and potential clients, as well as space and time to offer my own group classes. Teaching the group classes further deepened my understanding of what I learned, especially GOATA and it’s effectiveness. Despite being a seemingly simple system my GOATA based classes always got great feedback, especially from people with knee, hip, and or back pain.

I was still struggling with how to combine GOATA, the mobility training I had learned from FRC, and the strength and power training I loved. The next course promised to do just that. The Functional Range System Internal Strength Method from FAS brought together FRC mobility training, methods typical reserved for physical therapy, and the methods used by the top strength coaches in the world (guys like Louis Simmons and the coaches of the Soviet weightlifting team through the 70s and 80s). It was finally starting to really make sense and with what I was able to apply from what I learned in that class my rehabilitation took another BIG step forward. I was beginning to feel like I could see the light at the end of the tunnel. The only problem with the Internal Strength Method (ISM) was that it covered too much ground. As far as writing a program was concerned ISM gave me broad brush and I needed a pencil. I needed a way to simplify all the complexity of what I had learned up to this point. By the grace of God (again), around that time, I noticed StrongFirst instructors Pavel Tsatsouline and Fabio Zonin were offering a seminar on exercise programming. It was called “Programming Demystified”. Sold. It turned out to be exactly what I needed. They somehow managed to distill programming for anyone from beginners to olympians into a two day seminar. Unsurprisingly, they emphasized simplicity in programming and sticking with tried and true principles that have proven their effectiveness for decades at the highest levels. It was exactly what I needed to learn at exactly the right time.

The simplicity of exercise selection and programming combined with the training philosophies and methodologies I had previously learned made the application of my training that much more effective. I took another big step closer towards the light.

This is where I trail off a bit, because the story isn’t done. Despite taking me 34 years and some change of life, 25ish years of training and exercise, 7 years since crashing my motorcycle and having my priorities shifted from performance to pain, and 3 years since quitting my job to get out of pain and back to performance, it feels like the story is just beginning. As I write this my back is tight and sore yet this time it feels like progress.