This is a brief account of the evolution of TrainSMART Personal Fitness, LLC into a company that strives to provide a complete solution for Holistic Fitness and Wellness. Our MISSION is to change the world starting by changing the way fitness is done right here in downtown Buffalo and in Western New York, one human being at a time. We are insanely excited and fired up about it! It pretty much went like this:
- Professional Fitness Training
- Sports Medicine
- Nutrition
- Breathing
- Mindfulness
Equals a complete solution for Holistic Fitness and Wellness
Or: Working Out → Being Really Good at Working Out → Trainers → Understanding Movement → Professional Trainers → Understanding that just about every client is injured or has dysfunction → Adding Sports Medicine → Understanding that just about all of our clients wanted to Lose Fat → Adding Nutrition → Focusing on Breathing → Focusing Mindfulness
Equals a complete solution for Holistic Fitness and Wellness
Or you could say:
- Movement Medicine
- Food Medicine
- Sleep Medicine
- Mind Medicine
Equals a complete solution for Holistic Fitness and Wellness
I started training at the age of 13 back in 1984. I still remember that right after I ate my meals I would immediately start doing push ups, sit ups, and other exercises because I reasoned that I could turn the food right into muscle as I was digesting it. Laugh out Loud! I loved working out and I got good at it, so I became a Trainer. I loved training, became obsessed with it to a degree and the way it made me feel and how it empowered me. You could distinctively feel and see your body changing right before your eyes. It was close to immediate gratification. It helped me to establish my identity, the way I saw myself, and it changed the way the world related to me. I’ve always had a deeply rooted powerful and relentless desire to help people so…
I became a TRAINER. I didn’t understand movement and didn’t even really know what it was. I just figured that everybody was like me and that if they did what I did, they would get the same results. I wanted to be great, so I spent about $200, studied, and became a CERTIFIED PERSONAL TRAINER. You know, pretty much like that 18-year-old really well built guy in the gym who is a trainer. Along the way, I started to understand MOVEMENT. I started to learn biomechanically corrective movement patterns, pushing, pulling, hinging, the importance of a neutral spine, and how the body works. Things like anatomy, physiology, and kinesiology became important.
I was truly blessed by GOD and helped by many truly amazing Fitness and Sports Medicine Professionals that fast tracked my understanding of a more complete picture and the need for a complete solution for Holistic Fitness and Wellness I feel strongly compelled to thank the following people and companies who really taught me and continue to teach me. A sincere Thank you to: Chris Nentarz, Walter Brown, Matt Meyer, Dr. Michael Geraci, Dr. Stuart McGill, and an incredible company called Perform Better which connected me to many of the best fitness, medical, and sports medicine professionals in the world. Once I had a competent understanding of movement and the principles of movement, I became a PROFESSIONAL FITNESS TRAINER. “The more you know. The more you know you don’t know.” We still have so much to learn but we continue to get better every day!
So we had PROFESSIONAL FITNESS TRAINERS but we soon realized that nearly every one of our customers had injuries that they were or were not aware of, dysfunction, and weak links. I mean every single one with very few exceptions. Gray Cook and Lee Burton from Functional Movement Systems taught us the following critically important equation that underscored a need for complete solution for Holistic Fitness and Wellness:
Dysfunction + Fitness = Injury OK. That’s a game changer! If you put fitness on top of dysfunction you will get injury!
Oh it might not happen right away, because GOD gave us these brilliantly designed, strong, beautiful, and resilient bodies but, mark my words poor movement patterns result in injury over time, period the end. Many people don’t understand that “the vast majority of the most popular and common exercises done in fitness today are in fact, the least effective for fat loss and lead to injury over time!” It’s like smoking a cigarette. The first one isn’t going to kill you but it will get you over time.
We understood that if we wanted to provide a complete solution for Holistic Fitness and Wellness we needed to be able to fix, correct, and rehab dysfunction / injury. We committed ourselves to mastering SPORTS MEDICINE. I want to be clear that we didn’t and couldn’t do it alone. It takes a team and multi-disciplined approach. Enter our Dr. Brandon Mancuso who is truly a hybrid and the Fitness / Sports Medicine Professional of the future. Not only is Brandon a Doctor of Chiropractic, he also does critically important manual therapies like Active Release Technique and Graston, he does Kinesio Taping, he is a 2 Time TRX Professional Education Graduate in Sports Medicine and Group Training, a Certified Functional Movement Specialist, and was recently recognized as a winner of Business First’s Healthcare 50 Award recognizing medical professionals for improving the quality of healthcare in WNY. That was a solid and concrete step in the right direction but it didn’t bring us close to mastering sports medicine.
That’s why we have worked incredibly hard to surround ourselves with partners that we believe are the best Sports Medicine Professionals in Buffalo and WNY. We are the only fitness company to my knowledge that has a Medical Doctor (a Physiatrist) regularly consult with a Doctor of Chiropractic and an outstanding Physical Therapist to design corrective strategies for our clients. A Physiatrist is a medical doctor who uses Physical Medicine and diagnoses and treats both acute pain and chronic pain and specializes in a wide variety of nonsurgical treatments for the musculoskeletal system. The right Physiatrist is critical in delivering a complete solution for Holistic Fitness and Wellness. That 2nd and 3rd set of eyes can make all the difference in the world!
OK. So we had a great Professional Fitness Training and Sports Medicine solution that I would put up against just about anybody in the world but, it still was not a complete solution for Holistic Fitness and Wellness.
Along the way, we realized that the vast majority of our clients want to lose weight. They really want to lose fat but they don’t know that yet. I read the “Hierarchy of Fat Loss” written by Alwyn Cosgrove from Results Fitness who I’m actually on my way to see right know as I’m writing this on the plane. What I got out his article is that one could intelligently make the argument that 67% of fat loss comes from nutrition. WOW! That changes everything again! It’s obvious that we needed to master NUTRITION in order to provide a complete solution for Holistic Fitness and Wellness. Enter Pam Mancuso who is a Certified Health Coach from the Institute for Integrative Nutrition and life long learner on Nutrition who handles the nutrition component of our company. I personally spent over 200 hours in preparing a 2 part lecture series titled Proven Fat Loss Strategies – Part 1 Nutrition & Part 2 Exercise that I had the pleasure of presenting to over 100 Doctors and other medical professionals at Roswell Park Cancer Institute.
So there you have it. Finally, we had complete solution for Holistic Fitness and Wellness.
- PROFESSIONAL FITNESS TRAINING
- SPORTS MEDICINE
- NUTRITION
Please understand, we don’t do it this way because we’re trying to be special or unique or all-inclusive. We do it this way because we know it’s the way it has to be done. There is no other way! Professional Fitness Training, Sports Medicine, and Nutrition are all critical components of Holistic Fitness and Wellness. If you’re missing one of these components you’re solution is incomplete and will likely fail over time. Look around. Isn’t that what we see every day? Go to your local big box gym and take a look or maybe go to the Galleria Mall or Walmart and just look at how the Obesity Epidemic is running rampant. We see people go to the gym year after year, continue to do the same, and never change. It’s not working. It’s not a complete solution for Holistic Fitness and Wellness and that’s why it doesn’t work. The vast majority of these companies appear to be far more interested in collecting your money than in your success.
Then we kind of had an epiphany. We needed to do more to have a complete solution for Holistic Fitness and Wellness. I had an executive from one of Buffalo’s largest companies with thousands of employees recently call me and tell me that their employees are stressed, depressed, obese, and have muscular skeletal problems and asked me if I could help. I started thinking. We live busy fast paced stressful lives. It’s like we’re hamsters on a treadmill and everyday we constantly bump up the speed a little more. Take this, combined with too much sitting among other things and you realize that life as most Americans live a life that conspires against us and systemically sabotages the way our bodies work. So many of us simply don’t work and operate the way we were intended to.
We had to take a step back and get our clients to relax, and start with the basics. Steve Maxwell taught us that “the breath is the foundation for everything!” The vast majority of our clients are constantly stressed and in a state of chronic flight or fight mode and as a result don’t breathe properly which fatigues them, makes them less efficient, and weakens their immune system. You see when we get stressed our bodies can’t tell the difference between running late for work or running for your life from a wild bear. It’s a viscous cycle that contemporary civilization has evolved too. We know are just beginning to really focus on MINFULNESS or being present in the moment, stress reduction as well as proper BREATHING. I mean our diaphragm may be the most muscle in our body. You can live without eating for a pretty long time, without water for a few days, but literally only seconds with out breathing. Of course, breathing is critically important! I just had the pleasure of working with Steve Maxwell who is a legend in the Fitness world and he doesn’t even start regular training with a client until they reach a certain level of breathing competency.
So there you have it, a complete solution for HOLISTIC FITNESS AND WELLNESS. What will we add next? I don’t know but, we will continue to get better and to give our clients and any one who will listen or wants to join us our best as continue on our mission.
To learn more about TrainSMART Personal Fitness please click one of the following links:
- Professional Letters of Recommendation
- Our Process
- Comprehensive Assessment & Functional Movement Screen
Best of Health!
Joe Fox President TrainSMART Personal Fitness LLC
