I’m often told that I should share my story of how I became a personal trainer, and how Complete Fitness Results became the top personal training gym in St. Louis.
Honesty, I’ve always wanted to avoid my story because I’ve always wanted to avoid one question. Questions that haunted me and made me feel extremely insecure at the beginning of my career. The dreaded question….
“Where did you go to school?”
The truth is, I didn’t. Yep, the guy who owns the top personal training gym in St. Louis and teaches other personal trainers, chiropractors, physical therapists, and strength coaches around the world how to become better at their craft didn’t go to college. So how did I go from working at an auto body shop washing cars to the owner of Complete Fitness Results and Smart Group Training? Lets flash back to 2003.
After high school I really had no idea what I wanted to do. I was depressed and feeling hopeless that my only opportunity was to work in a manual labor job for the rest of my life. (That being said there is NOTHING wrong with manual labor jobs, I just knew I wanted to help people). I was eating like crap, drinking beer everyday, not exercising, and going through the motions in life to get to the weekend. I hated my job; I hated my body, and hated my life.
So what changed?
I’ll never forget the day it happened. I was working at the body shop weighing car parts to be shipped to people who were buying used parts on eBay. A co-worker stepped on the scale and said, “200 pounds, I’m up a couple of pounds”, then proceeded to ask me how much I weighed. I said with confidence that I weighed 220 pounds, and then hopped on that scale to find out that my delusion wasn’t even close. I was 270 pounds.
At the same time I realized I was 270 pounds I looked over at my boss standing in the doorway smoking his 50th cigarette of the day weighing in at over 300 pounds and saw my future. I knew that if I kept doing what I was doing, the best I could hope to be, would be him, and at that was unacceptable.
I left work that day and headed straight to Wal Mart to buy a shiny new set of weights for my basement, went to the supplement store to buy whatever they told me, and went to Barnes and Noble and bought two books. The Abs Diet, and The New Rules of Lifting. From that point it was on.
I worked out 4-5 days per week, changed my nutrition, studied constantly, and within 4 months lost 70 pounds!
For the first time in my life I had confidence, not only was I finally not fat, but I accomplished a major goal that I thought was impossible because of so many previous failures. I felt so amazing, and I grew so much in the process that I couldn’t stop talking about working out and eating right. After a while it was obvious that I had to work in this industry.
After being told I couldn’t work at curves or the YMCA I actually ended up working at the same supplement store that I went to the day of the “scale awakening”. I sold supplements for over a year, while studying for my personal training certification and eventually started working as a horrible personal trainer at a horrible personal training gym.
The lack of education ended up being a good thing for me because I HATED being the dumbest trainer in a gym full of average trainers, so I studied, and studied, and studied some more. I went to conferences as much as I could afford, I talked with other trainers to ask for advice, I read books, watched videos, got multiple additional certifications, worked with mentors, etc, and that still hasn’t ended.
After moving up the ladder to better and better gyms it was obvious in 2009 that it was time to do things on my own. That is when Complete Fitness Results was born.
Since then Complete Fitness Results has won numerous awards, I’ve presented to top trainers and health professionals in conferences all over the country, become a corrective exercise expert, co-authored an Amazon Best Selling book, been all over local media, but more important than all of those accolades helped 1000’s of clients and trainers get better and get happier.
I’ve been lucky to be able to attract people with just as much passion as myself to work with me to make Complete Fitness Results the cohesive and caring team that we are today. Some with lots of college experience, and some that were clients just like me.
The end result is something I’m truly proud of. A team of individuals that are passionate about fitness, education, and more than anything helping people feel the way I felt after achieving those results in my basement. The success stories we have had are amazing. I love watching dreams come true as my dream of helping more and more people comes true by having the top personal training gym in St. Louis.
So that’s my story and the story of how Complete Fitness Results came about. Although it’s true that I didn’t go to college, I hope you can see that I am educated. Educated in results. I would love to help you get the results that would change your life the way fitness has changed mine.