What I Refuse To Do With Anyone Over 45

I'm not sure what other trainers do. I know what I do. I try to make it clear as to what your goals are and what you need to do on a consistent basis to stay active as you age. That's the whole job. Everything else is decoration.

After twelve years of training people in Saint Charles, most of them somewhere between forty-five and sixty-five, I've built a short list of things I refuse to do. Not because they're trendy or untrendy, but because they cost you more than they give you at this stage of life. If you're thinking about hiring me, or thinking about hiring anyone, this list is the fastest way to understand what you'd actually be signing up for.

I refuse to use soreness as proof that a session worked

Somewhere along the way people decided that if you can't walk down stairs the next day, the workout was good. That's a young person's scoreboard, and honestly it's not even a good one for them. Soreness tells you a tissue got a stimulus it wasn't ready for. It doesn't tell you the stimulus was useful, and it definitely doesn't tell you it was safe.

Here's the practical problem. If Monday's session wrecks you, Tuesday's walk doesn't happen, Wednesday's round of golf hurts, and Thursday you skip because you're behind on work and still stiff. You did one hard workout and lost four days of movement. The math never works. What actually builds capability is a repeatable week: two or three good strength sessions, daily walking, and enough left in the tank that the rest of your life still happens.

So I load conservatively at the start, and then I add. Almost every client I've had is surprised at how much stronger they get in six months while never once feeling destroyed. That's not me going easy on you. That's me refusing to spend your recovery on nothing.

I refuse to train the mirror instead of the body

Most of my clients are not looking to build super strength to pick up a house. They want to be able to get up and go without having a bunch of aches and pains, and to be able to function and do athletic events. Read that again, because it's the most honest description of the goal I've ever gotten out of a conversation.

Training the mirror means chasing whatever muscle looks good in a photo. Training the body means asking what you have to be able to do on an ordinary Tuesday and building backwards from there. Getting off the floor. Carrying two bags up a flight of stairs. Turning your head all the way to back the car out. Standing on one leg long enough to get a sock on. Those are strength skills, and they respond to training exactly like a bench press does.

The funny part is you usually get the mirror anyway. People lose weight, they get more flexible, they stand up straighter. But it comes as a byproduct of building a body that works, not as the target.

I refuse to skip the boring stuff

• Ankle and hip mobility, every session, even when you'd rather load the bar.
• Single-leg work, because balance is a trainable skill and it's the one that keeps you independent.
• Rotation and anti-rotation, because golf swings, backing out of driveways and reaching into back seats are all rotation.
• Grip and carries, because carrying things is the most underrated life skill there is.
• Getting down to the floor and back up, on purpose, until it stops being an event.

None of that is exciting to program and none of it goes viral. All of it is the difference between a sixty-five-year-old who travels and a sixty-five-year-old who's careful on stairs.

I refuse to give you a program I don't understand your life well enough to give

If you have a shoulder that's been cranky for nine years, that changes the plan. If you sit in meetings for nine hours, that changes the plan. If your knee replacement was eighteen months ago, that changes the plan and it does not end it. I've never once looked at a limitation and thought, well, that's the end of the road. I look at it and think, okay, here's what we work around and here's what we work on.

“As I was aging, it was clear that people my age were not staying fit. They were not staying healthy and they were not staying flexible.”

That's why I started doing this. I watched it happen to people my own age and it didn't have to. So no, you are not too old to start, and no, this is not going to be the thing that finally wrecks your joints. Done properly, strength training is one of the most joint-friendly things you can do, because strong muscle is what keeps a joint from absorbing every impact by itself.

What I do instead

We get clear on what you want to still be doing in ten and twenty years. We pick the handful of capabilities that protect it. We train them consistently, at a load you can repeat, and we adjust as your life moves around. Seeing people improve, lose weight, become more flexible is very rewarding to me, and after twelve years it hasn't gotten old.

If that sounds like the way you'd want to be coached, take a look at how the training is structured on the services page, or just reach out through the contact page and we'll talk about where you're at. Next, read why balance is the single most valuable skill you can train after forty-five.