Growing up, fitness and proper nutrition have always been apart of my daily life. I’ve always loved staying active through sports and different activities with family and friends. Going swimming and spending lots of time outdoors is how I spent a lot of my early childhood. I played almost every major sport, mostly baseball and martial arts/ taekwondo and I think this helped me build a strong athletic foundation growing up. 

When I was 8 years old I started playing ice hockey and I quickly fell in love with the sport. Playing was a fantastic way for me to learn at an early age the values of teamwork, respect, hard work and dedication, and I can fully admit was one of the reasons I wanted to learn more about fitness. I was very intrigued and interested in the ways that I could improve my game off the ice. For this reason I started dry land training and I tried to learn as many exercises as possible, so that I could improve my on ice abilities. 

For the most part, I usually only focused on lower body movements, until later in my career when I sprained and fractured the same ankle in the same season. Since I was unable to train my lower half for sometime, this pushed me to start training and learning more about exercises I could preform for my upper body. While injured, I really didn’t have much else to do, so I spent almost all of my time in the gym and going to physical therapy. I quickly fell in love with the constant frequency of my training and the vast variety of workouts I was learning and incorporating, which happened to be mostly bodybuilding style of workouts for the most part. This is what really pushed my curiosity to learn more and more about the human body and to preform safe and effective exercises at the gym. 

I attended college at Missouri state university, where I continued to play hockey and I started out as a history major. I quickly realized that as much as I loved and enjoyed history, my true passion was for fitness, so I switched my major to exercise and movement science. It was a bit of a change up, but I really enjoyed what I was learning and it benefited me greatly because I was able to learn more in depth about the biomechanics of exercise, muscle anatomy and physiology. It also allowed me to better improve the exercises and movements I was already doing. Here I also gained extensive knowledge on sports nutrition and supplementation, which also helped aid my recovery and off ice performance. 

My passion for training is as high as it was in the beginning and don’t think that will ever change. I myself am always striving to do better and improve on everything that I can. Now I have an even bigger passion for training and motivating people along their fitness journeys and transformations. Everyone and every body is different and there is no clear cut approach that works universally for everyone. Everyone has different goals and what might work for one person, might not work for the next. I find this challenge very fun and exciting because it gives us the opportunity to experiment with what truly works for you. 

It’s a truly rewarding feeling to help someone achieve their goals and to truly change their life for the better by adopting healthier habits and an overall healthier lifestyle.