Esther

Personal Trainer

I’ve been a mover and a shaker all my life. I didn’t start out this way as I was a very sickly baby. So sick that I didn’t have a name til I turned one… when they thought I had a chance of survival. My mom’s first born, my sister, had the same heart defect I had but she didn’t survive. No one thought I would be able to run, let alone be a trainer! My fitness education is solidly grounded in Gray Institute. Applied Functional Science is based on scientific truth, not theory, of how the human body moves in all three planes. And this is where Gooder Fitness programming is unique. You not only perform traditional exercises like squats, lunges, pull, push, etc., but by tweaking the angles and moving in the other two planes so often neglected, you build a balanced body that can move well and the risk of injury is reduced. I think the best education is from experience. I was blessed to have worked at Memorial Sloan-Kettering in NYC where I got hands on experience training cancer patients. I learned how to listen, modify and move with my clients. When you work with people who are working out for a reason other than aesthetics, your own perspective on the definition of fintess changes. I am forever grateful for the experience I had there. If you asked me what my outlook on fitness was 5 years ago, my answer would have been very different than it is today. So much focus was on body image. I was in that camp for many years. Maybe it’s because I’m older or because I’ve had many injuries… the most recent one was a few years ago where I worked out so hard, I got rhabdomyolysis. It put me in the hospital for 5 days and then I had to take 7 weeks off from working out. Today, what a fit person looks like to me is that they are happy and enjoying life. They don’t have a restrictive lifestyle because of diet and they aren’t working out for hours at the gym. You see a balance and they know that they can reign it back in if they need to in any of these two departments. They train smart. They may not have a 6-pack, but boy, are they strong and can move like an athlete. It takes strength to move your body like an athlete. Agility, mobility, flexibility are all ingrained in my program. Program Focus: Mind-to-muscle. You’ve heard this phrase before. This is where you can tell your body when and how to contract and it does it. It is also coordination. My clients come to me and say, “I am not very coordinated.” However, after working together for awhile, they find that they can pick moves up faster and that they have control over their bodies. What you don’t use, you lose… and the opposite is also true. I’ve gone out of my way to get certifications from modalities that serve me and my clients. I love TRX. Bodyweight in a plank position to activate the core in almost every position? That is efficient training. Animal Flow. This method is by far the most effective and fun to create coordination, mobility, flexibility, agility. You will learn all this and more in the Gooder Fitness Platform. I bring in EVERYTHING I have learned from my movement career… figure skating, Hapkido, cheerleading… it’s all in there and waiting for you. The goal of Gooder Fitness is to get you stronger and leaner, AND for you to change your lifestyle to that of a fit lifestyle where movement becomes a part of you. You will work hard. You may get frustrated. But you are going work through it. And at the end, you will move so well that age becomes irrelevant.