From The Skinny Kid To Eighteen Years Under The Bar

I got into lifting weights after high school because I was tired of being the skinny kid. That is the whole origin story. There was no grand plan, no coach who spotted potential in me. Just a young guy in Memphis who was tired of how he felt walking into rooms, and a barbell that did not care about any of that.

Eighteen years later I am still under that bar, and the reasons have changed about four times. It is worth telling you how, because it is the same arc most of my clients end up walking.

Phase one: I wanted to look different

For the first couple of years, I trained for the mirror. I am not going to pretend otherwise or dress it up as something nobler. It was vanity, and vanity got me in the door, which is more than a lot of good intentions manage.

What vanity did not do was teach me anything. I did what looked hard rather than what worked. I chased soreness. I trained around whatever hurt instead of asking why it hurt. I got bigger and I got a little stronger, and I also built a set of movement habits I would spend years undoing.

Phase two: the people who actually knew things

The turn came when I got into the powerlifting community and, honestly, got humbled. I have had the honor of getting to learn from and train under elite lifters, and the first thing you notice around people at that level is how unspectacular their training looks. No theatrics. No grinding every set into the ground. Just precise, repeatable work and an almost obsessive attention to position.

The second thing you notice is how generous they are with what they know. Nobody in that world guarded information from me. They fixed my setup, told me my brace was garbage, and then spotted me on the next set. That culture is the reason I coach the way I do — knowledge is supposed to move downhill, not sit in somebody's pocket.

Competing changed my relationship to the numbers too. On a platform you get three attempts and three judges, and nobody cares how heavy it felt. Either the lift met the standard or it did not. That clarity is oddly freeing. It also permanently killed my interest in reps that only counted if you did not look too closely.

Phase three: the body sends its invoice

Somewhere along the way — and every lifter who trains long enough has this chapter — things started to complain. Not a dramatic injury. Just the accumulated cost of years of positions I had no business being in, showing up as a hip that would not cooperate and a low back that got a vote it should not have had.

That is where mobility stopped being a warm-up formality for me and became the actual point. I really focus on good form and mobility above anything else because that will keep you successfully lifting long term. I did not arrive at that from a textbook. I arrived at it from being the guy who had to walk it back.

This is also why I am immovable on technique with my clients. I am not protecting an abstract principle. I am trying to save somebody four years of my own detour.

Phase four: what it is actually for

My goal is not only to help people get physically stronger, but also to create life-long healthy habits that give them and those around them the best version of themselves from the inside out. That sentence sounds big until you see what it looks like on a Tuesday. It looks like eating a real breakfast. It looks like going to bed at a consistent hour. It looks like showing up on a day you do not feel like it and doing the lighter session instead of skipping.

The phrase "and those around them" is the part I mean most. I have been happily married since 2011, my wife and I lead Celebrate Recovery at our church, and I have watched more than one person get stronger in the gym and become noticeably easier to live with at home. Energy compounds outward. So does the other thing.

Reps are scales

I have been playing metal music as a vocalist since I was fifteen, and I still play guitar and bass on the worship team at my church. Two worlds that sound nothing alike, one identical discipline underneath: you practice the boring fundamentals until they become invisible, and then you get to actually make something.

Nobody wants to run scales. Everybody wants to play the song. But the players who can play the song are the ones who ran the scales, and the lifters who hit the big numbers are the ones who did the unglamorous work of a clean setup ten thousand times. Reps are scales. Programming is a setlist. Progress is a tempo you can keep.

Why any of this should matter to you

If you are wondering whether you are strong enough to start — you are. That question has never once had a different answer. The bar starts wherever you start. I have taught people to squat with a broomstick and I did not think less of them for a second.

Training with me entails encouragement while also not letting you sell yourself short. Those two halves are not in tension. The encouragement is what gets you to try the heavier set. Not letting you sell yourself short is what makes sure the set was worth trying. You will begin to believe that you can do it because together we won't fail.

I am still the skinny kid in some small corner of my head. I suspect I always will be. It turns out that is useful, because it means I have never forgotten what the first day feels like.

If you want the nuts and bolts of how the coaching works, the services page covers it. If you want the programming logic underneath it, read how to program strength without guessing. And whenever you are ready, the contact page is right there — a form, a phone number, and a real person on the other end.