I love these guys so much. Mike is basically the nicest person you'll ever meet, and even though I've heard this is "The Place" to go for personal training, it's not intimidating at all. It's very personalized, and very chill. All ages, all body types with various fitness/health goals. No hints of snobbishness or social class anything.
I am not unathletic, but was not very all-around fit. I like certain activities, but I hate exercise for the sake of exercise, so I have really lazy phases. I did rock climbing for a while, for instance, but probably couldn't have run a mile. I also had a knee injury (patella) that I was worried about, and a general "weak knee" issue that I wanted a trainer to take seriously, without just trying to push me through the pain or something.
I went in to talk to Mike about pairing me with someone with a specialty in sports injuries, because of my weird knees. He said that none of his trainers have specialties, because they are all so good that they know everything about everything. He may not have said that exactly, but that was kind of the gist. He pairs people based on personality.
So I got started with Melissa, who is fantastic. Serious, but not at all mean or drill-sergeant-like. I wanted to get toned for my wedding, and she figured out immediately what my level was, seemingly for each muscle group or exercise. Even in yoga classes I am sometimes afraid of hurting myself because my patella had subluxated during the injury, and I have to be careful with things like twisting movements. With Melissa, the workouts were seriously intense but I never had that anxiety where I wasn't sure if it might be bad for my body, and it felt so good to be able to push myself without that fear.
After some weeks of treadmill warm-ups before the serious stuff, we started going outside for my warm-up cardio. I was having knee pain in the days following, and we stopped doing that because my knees weren't so cool with running on concrete. That didn't stop us from continuing to increase the difficulty of the other exercises, we just changed things around based on what my body needed. To strengthen my quads I did loads of squats and lunges, and to my great surprise, my "normal" knee pain (different from concrete-running knee pain) diminished as my muscles were able to better support my movements. These unexpected benefits were what made it such a great experience. I went in for the wedding dress benefits, but ended up feeling so great that I stopped caring how sculpted my shoulders were or whatever other little things a bride obsesses over. I had wanted to lose some weight, but as my body became more toned I became totally happy with the *same* weight, because I just looked, well, better overall. Melissa gave me an at-home regimen based on my original goals (more cardio to lose those pounds I'd mentioned at first), and it actually became harder to stick to it because I was so comfortable with my progress. (Sorry, Melissa!) I even stopped drinking so much - another completely unexpected benefit. Increased endorphin flows or something. I just felt so good and wanted to take better care of my body, and support my hard work.
If I could afford to do this forever, I totally would. I just need to find the discipline to keep it up without my buddy Melissa there going "5 more, you can do it!" read more