From The Back Of A Pickup Truck To Thirty Years Of Coaching

I moved to Los Angeles many, many years ago with the hope that I was going to become the next action movie star. I know how that sounds. Don't laugh. Everybody at that bus stop had the same plan. The difference is that mine was actually starting to work. I was in shape, I was showing up, and I got a part in a movie. That is the part of the story people expect to hear.

Here is the part they don't. I was injured by my trainer. Not by a stunt, not by bad luck, not by pushing myself past some noble limit. By a man I paid to keep me healthy, who ran me through something my body was not prepared for and did not stop when he should have. Things got pretty ugly after that. The role went away. The income went away. I lost the place I was living. For a stretch of my life I was homeless, sleeping in the back of a pickup truck in the city I had come to conquer.

What an injury actually costs

I want to be specific about this because the fitness industry talks about injuries like they are line items. Tweaked a shoulder. Took some time off. In reality an injury is a domino. You cannot work, so you cannot pay, so you move somewhere worse, so you sleep worse, so you heal slower, so you cannot work. I did not lose a training block. I lost a year of my life and most of a plan for it. That is what is actually at stake when somebody loads a barbell onto a body they have not assessed.

Why I stayed for thirty years

That decision was made out of something close to anger, and anger is a fine engine to start with but a terrible one to run on for three decades. What kept me here was different. It was the first client who told me she could get down on the floor with her grandkids again. It was the guy who stopped bracing himself on the handrail. It was the new trainer in one of our live certification rooms who finally understood why we assess before we load, and who is now not going to do to somebody what was done to me. That multiplies. My injury only had one victim. A well-taught coach has hundreds of people who never get hurt and never know why.

So we built NCEP around two things at once: training people directly, and certifying the people who will train everybody we will never meet. We still teach live events all throughout the United States, and we will never give this up. Video is efficient. A live room is honest. In a live room somebody with a replaced knee raises their hand and asks what to do, and you have to have a real answer standing up in front of thirty people.

What that history built into the method

• Assess before you load. Every time. No exceptions, no matter how eager the client is.
• Regress without drama. If it hurts, we change it that session, not next month.
• Build capability, not soreness. The scoreboard is what you can do on Tuesday.
• Plan for the real week. Tired, short on time, kid awake at 5am — the plan bends, it does not break.
• Stay teachable. Thirty years is not a reason to stop learning, it is thirty years of evidence that you never could.

If you are just starting

Total beginners are my favorite people to work with, and it is partly selfish. A beginner has not yet learned any bad habits from a bad coach. Nobody has told them yet that pain is progress. We get to build the whole relationship with training on a floor that is level. If that is you — if you are twenty-something and want to get genuinely strong and capable, or you want to do this for a living and get certified and hired inside a gym — you are exactly who this was built for.

I would like you to become part of our NCEP family. That is not a marketing line I workshopped. It is what thirty years of this has actually felt like, and it is the reason I still pick up the phone myself.

Read what I refuse to do as a trainer for the principles in full, or the balance and mobility guide for the technical side of the method. When you are ready, the services page shows what working together looks like, and the contact page gets you a free consult with me directly.