Is our quest for longevity just masking our fear of aging? Diana can only hike Antarctica, Patagonia, and the Galapagos if she’s injury-free I started training in my early twenties, and my clients were 45-65.  Now I’m a bit older, and those same clients are 65-85.  I’ve adapted my training style dramatically over that time, partly through continuing education, but mostly to adapt to an aging clientele (and my own aging body). My clients might want to run marathons and move heavy weight around, but they certainly have no business doing so.  My job is to protect them from themsel ..read more

Someone has to make the tank tops look good…and it’s not men. The product of a single mother, I was conditioned from an early age that women were equal to men (even though my mother proclaimed intellectual superiority to all of her ex-husbands).  Women could do anything, learn anything, and earn anything that a man could.  A great lesson, but it gave me blinders when studying to become a trainer.  I never considered gender when studying Exercise Physiology.  To me, the body was the body.  But, from the pictures in anatomy textbooks to the test subjects for every exerc ..read more

Starting to Exercise is Safe; Going Back to Exercise is Dangerous I remember being much bigger… Memory is a funny thing. The older we get, the fonder our memories become. What we used to look like, who we dated, even the grades we made all appear brighter with the passage of time. Recollection of our physical abilities works exactly the same way. We all remember exercising more and working harder as young people than we actually did. When we got injured, we remember the recovery being much faster. This misconception gets risky when we try to train the way we “remember” training when we were 2 ..read more

Tank Tops May Be Hazardous To Your Health There’s not much to say…even Rook is confused Personal training has come a long way from the 90’s body-builder days.  Men in tank tops are mostly gone, and I haven’t had anyone try to sell me steroids in 20 years.  Despite all the progress, though, we have a lot further to go.  We trainers get a bad rap for good reason; too many clients get injured on our watch.  “We” is a broad and all-encompassing term for those in the industry who injure clients: trainers, coaches, and boot-camp instructors.  Our industry relies heavily on ..read more

“If you’re gonna’ be dumb, you’d better be tough” I once lost a client because I would not allow him to perform this exercise… I heard this quote countless times from a young age, and never listened until my mid-thirties.  So many things I did in my youth were rationalized for being the “tough” way.  My 45 year-old self looks back and smiles.  I wasn’t being tough…just dumb.   Life experience changes the way we approach many things: relationships, money, life balance, even happiness.  We hope to get better at these challenges and make our lives more fulfilling.&n ..read more