Skip to content

People/Profiles

category Article Categories

Research/News

Fitness Heals in the Wake of Hurricane Sandy

Hurricane Sandy took the East Coast by surprise and, as a result, people lived through incredible events. As the owner of a health and wellness center, I wondered what we…

Danielle Vindez

Danielle Vindez’s 17 years in the fitness industry have been very rewarding. She believes that celebrating others’ wins is the greatest reward. “When an 83-year-old Parkinson’s-challenged client regains the use of his legs, it is a glorious moment,” Danielle says.

Shawn Fears

Shawn Fears enjoys proving that nothing is impossible. He has had shoulder surgery, three epidurals for a herniated disk and two knee surgeries. Despite these setbacks, he set a personal record of back-squatting 420 pounds.

Shawn Connolly

Shawn Connolly is a physical therapist and a stunt performer in Sirens of T.I.® at Treasure Island Hotel and Casino. He hopes to encourage others by promoting, teaching and living a healthy lifestyle. Shawn is also very involved in giving back to the community. He regularly volunteers or participates in several charity races in his hometown of Las Vegas.

IDEA Author, Presenter Reaches Everest Base Camp

Here I am [on the right] at the base camp of Mount Everest, which is 17,600 feet. Our training and acclimatization were brilliant. We started at around 9,000 feet and then went progressively higher and slept at a higher level. The day before base camp we climbed Kala Pattar, which is 18,200 feet. We had a great view of Everest and a psychological edge for the following day. The guides and sherpas could have had a degree in exercise physiology. They knew our bodies better than we did. Two of the 10 people on our team needed to go back down because they had symptoms of altitude sickness.

LaRue Cook, MHA, JD

As a sports performance and injury prevention trainer and a licensed attorney with a concentration in health care, LaRue Cook strives to get his messages about health and wellness into the world through enthusiasm and by example.

Karin Singleton

Karin Singleton’s passion and enthusiasm for fitness remain undeterred despite not starting her personal training career until age 40. Before coming to the fitness industry Karin worked in the corporate world, which she believes gives her a better idea of where her clients are coming from.

Michael Saiz

Personal trainer Michael Saiz likes to think out of the box and keep his clients on their toes. He was inspired by his high-school football coach to integrate drive and determination into his training regimen, and he passes on that wisdom to his clients.

Jason Karp, PhD

As a personal trainer specializing in running, Jason Karp has created a unique niche for himself. He encourages others to do the same. Jason’s teaching style has been called strong, but subtle, by others, but he claims to focus mainly on intrinsic rewards. “Running is unique in that it has the power to reveal things in us, so I use that as a way to motivate and inspire my clients to find out what those things are,” Jason says. He also invests in making changes in the relationship between the fitness industry and the medical field. Jason is pushing for exercise physiology to become a requirement for physicians in the future.

Team Development: The Perfect Member Experience

If you had only one chance to make a good first impression, you wouldn’t want to blow it by providing potential clients with a subpar initial experience. Yet, a shoddy introduction and a useless tour followed by a hardcore sales pitch are what people sometimes get when they walk into a fitness facility.

Maintaining Motivation

After Sam Sahagun embraced an exercise program and lost 55 pounds, he decided he wanted to pay it forward by helping other people with their fitness journeys. As a fairly new fitness pro, he enjoys using the free Client Challenges tool that is accessible through IDEA FitnessConnect, the largest directory of fitness professionals, connecting more than 16 million consumers to more than 250,000 fitness professionals online at www.ideafit.com. Below he shares his thoughts on how this tool helps him run challenges to inspire his clients.

Taking Care of the Teacher

What steps do you take to maintain wellness, balance and perspective? We asked instructors to talk about their self-care strategies and why they matter for career success.

Restoring the Injured Athlete

client: Dana | personal trainer: Michael Piercy, owner, The Lab | location: West Caldwell, New Jersey
Injury. When Michael Piercy, owner of The Lab (Performance & Sports Science), first met Dana in the summer of 2008, she presented with a rare condition described by doctors as “functional movement disorder.” According to The Lancet Neurology (2012; 11 [3], 250–60), functional movement disorders are included in a wide spectrum of neurological disorders and are difficult to both diagnose and treat.

Success Inside a Health Club

Gayle Winegar, founder and owner of SweatShop Health Club in Saint Paul, Minnesota, sensed Pilates “would be big” in 1994 after her fitness director, Jill Winegar, took classes at Rancho La Puerta.

An Interview with Lolita San Miguel

Seventy-seven-year old master teacher Lolita San Miguel believes in always putting your best foot forward. Toward that end, she teaches Pilates instructors how and why the foot can impact our overall well-being.

Uniting the Industry: Transformation Stories

How can Pilates help clients make critical transitions in their lives? For this issue, we talked to Pilates instructors and their clients about how Pilates training has helped them through times of change.

Mary Bowen, Part Two

It has been more than five decades since 81-year-old Pilates elder Mary Bowen began working with Joseph Pilates, and she has continued to develop and grow her own distinctive and charismatic style ever since.

Lineage Links: Mary Bowen, Part 1

First-generation master teacher Mary Bowen is a Pilates treasure. At 81, she still shares her distinctive blend of Pilates and Jungian psychoanalysis with students as a full-time practitioner, calling her combined approach Pilates Plus Psyche.