"I Am Doing The Thing!"

“I AM DOING THE THING!” I exclaimed into the phone.

“You are. You are doing the thing!” Kate celebrated with me.

Kate and I met in the ‘90s during our first few days of college. And since then we both went on to grad school, became moms, changed careers, and have gone back to school, again. Our lives are unfolding in parallel, she in South Carolina and me in New York. We do a lot of cheering each other by phone and text.

Let me tell you what the thing is:  My online certification course is going to launch this winter - Trauma Sensitive Strength Training A Practical Program for Personal Trainers, Coaches, and Physical Therapists. Over the past year I have worked in my capacity as the Director of Trauma Informed Training for the 501(c)3 nonprofit, Women’s Strength Coalition (WSC)  to design and produce an interdisciplinary course that would bring together wonderful teachers and practitioners to teach trainers, coaches, and physical therapists how to identify, program for, and work with folks with trauma, while remaining squarely in their scope of practice. 

The idea of being the change you want in this world, has always resonated with me. I decided to become a fitness professional because I recognized that the world of fitness needed to change to reflect what I had learned through research and personal experience. I wanted fitness professionals to understand that: 

1. Trauma is a public health problem that is way more pervasive than most folks understand and that if you work with clients, you likely work with clients with trauma.

2. A lot of the behaviors celebrated by fitness culture can also be unhealthy trauma coping mechanisms that if reinforced, can worsen trauma symptoms and harm people’s mental and physical health. 

3. Trauma impacts the central nervous system in profound ways that, if not accounted for, can compromise people’s ability to reach their fitness goals.

I know this first-hand because I was this client living with trauma. 

Right before I woke up with sciatica so severe I had partial paralysis of my left lower leg and could barely use a toilet on my own, I was powerlifting 3 days a week, weightlifting 2 days a week, and going to karate 5 days a week.  I was doing double days. I was leaner and looked stronger than I had ever had, and coaches and teachers would point to me as an example of discipline. People at the gym, family members, and old friends wanted to know how I had become what they perceived to be the picture of health. Here is the kicker: I also thought I was becoming the picture of health. 

What most folks didn’t know was that I was that I was operating under the influence of trauma and the physical changes it made to my brain and body. Fear was driving me and I had a very overwhelming desire to be in control. People, even my trainers and coaches, didn’t know that I was regularly having intrusive thoughts and flashbacks under the weight of the barbell, and that I had insomnia. They didn’t know that when I wasn’t training, I would collapse, lying like a lump in bed, but that my body was still in a sympathetic state. I was in freeze, not rest and digest.  I was nearly incapable of rest.

Only my therapist asked, “Why are you training like this?”

“I want to be as strong as possible.” I said.

“Why do you want to be as strong as possible?”

“So... I am ready for... anything,” I replied in a stilted manner. I did not like the question. Initially, I thought my therapist must be naive, but her concern, which I picked up on, began to sink in. I suspect it planted a tiny seed-like thought that perhaps what I was doing was not healthy. I continued training to be stronger than every threat that lurked behind every corner. But then one morning, I woke up and I could not walk, much less fight whomever or whatever I thought was coming for me. 

I was terrified. But I love to learn, so while I was stuck in bed I helped myself through a self-directed study of trauma. I learned as much as I could about the physiology of PTSD. I created a comprehensive wellness plan for myself that included physical therapy and eventually powerlifting.  With the help of numerous wellness professionals - coaches, trainers, physical therapists, therapists, and trauma practitioners— I learned how to heal from my injury, return to training safely, and keep progressing in the gym. I also happened to create conditions for healing that I was able to use outside of the gym—all of which kept me coming back to the gym! I turned a trauma-injury cycle into a healing cycle. 

I want to empower trainers, coaches, and physical therapists to be able to help all clients reach their fitness and health goals,which means teaching them how trauma impacts their clients’ physiology and how to program clients accordingly. I can’t do that sitting on bum at home or by just working with a handful of clients. I can’t do it with gym selfies and hashtags. I can’t do it alone either. And that is why I have created an interdisciplinary certification program with multiple presenters.

People with trauma conditions and chronic stress want to train for a host of reasons, but many folks find that, even the most well-meaning fitness professionals don’t understand the impact that trauma and chronic stress has on their physiology and are often not aware how this could impact their training. In turn, these folks are facing unbreakable plateaus, setbacks, and injury. 

I want more fitness professionals to understand the impact of trauma on the kinetic chain, recovery, stress tolerance, and the capacity for athleticism so that their programing and cueing will help clients achieve their goals - whether they want to get stronger, faster, healthier, more athletic, or to reduce chronic pain. The physiological changes trauma and chronic stress introduce, impact your client’s movement system and endocrine system, as well as their thoughts and behaviors. Trauma and chronic stress do not make it so that clients cannot reach their goals, they are simply factors that need to be accounted for.

Additionally, a lot of the messaging that comes out of fitness culture via social media often celebrates behaviors like no rest days, training like a machine, and restricting food. It celebrates what you look like more than what you feel like, perhaps because it is easier to gauge appearances over health. But appearances can be deeply misleading. I wake up everyday excited to use fitness to promote physical and mental health!

As always, I choose to approach this work in a way that both sustains me and aligns with my principles, goals, and mission; doing so contributes to my overall sense of wellbeing.  WSC’s mission, to expand access to fitness, sport, and strength training, to build a global community that is rooted in equity and inclusion aligns with my own goal of increasing access to trauma-sensitive strength training opportunities. It is one of the reasons the organization is so dear to me. As such I produced this program for WSC in order to support their work in an ongoing capacity. And it will increase access to trauma-sensitive strength training opportunities by creating more trauma-sensitive fitness professionals. 

This is a project born forth from so much pain but also so much personal growth, support from others, and love. It feels important and immense leaving me to exclaim, “I AM DOING THE THING!”

If you would like to be added to the TSST launch list, you can subscribe here!

If not, thank you for reading this far and bearing witness to my jumping on the bed levels of joy and excitement.