About
Freaky Fitness is dedicated to helping you find a home in your body. Learn more about my approach to training and my values here.
Building Internal Awareness:
What does it feel like to be inside your body?
As a personal trainer, I focus on clients’ functional goals. What are the activities you love to do and how can we make them easier and more accessible to you? More fun?
In companionship with standard fitness education, I help clients orient their awareness internally - to feel the body from the inside and create a map for self-guided movement to ease tension, calm the nervous system, and build strength and mobility.
I serve as a guide to providing care to the self that can be difficult to get from our taxing, noisy world. This includes consulting on parts of day-to-day life that influence how it feels to exist inside our bodies as part of the coaching relationship.
The way it feels to exist inside our bodies is affected by dozens of factors. Skin, hair, and clothing all influence our energy and motivation. The way we sit during work at a desk job and the positions we sleep in each night affect how it feels to move throughout the day. By asking questions about your life I can help you identify patterns, behaviors, and factors that are showing up in your body.
So let’s figure out if part of the reason your back hurts is from poor lumbar support at your desk chair. Let’s see if sleeping with a pillow under your knees takes some of the pressure off that recurring hip pain. Maybe I can show you a nerve glide (an exercise that stretches and aligns the nerves) you can do while you’re watching tv that will increase your range of motion over time.
About Dan
I’m Dan (he/him).
For more than 15 years, I’ve studied the body, movement, and mental health. I’ve developed my programming from years of study in sports medicine, kinesthesiology, yoga, qigong, psychology, nutritional science, and anatomy and physiology.
My personal journey includes significant weight gain, serious injury, years of mental health treatment, and chronic illness.
In my late teens, I experienced some life changes that resulted in significant disconnect from my body. I lost touch with inner self. The journey to reconnect has been ongoing for 16 years- and will continue the rest of my life.
The process of re-connecting with my body through movement includes weight lifting, bodyweight fitness, yoga, dance, and meditation.
Over the years, I have worked with trainers and physical therapists, studied massage therapy, and practiced over one thousand hours of yoga. I’ve done significant amounts of research into everything you’ll see mentioned on my website.
My first career was in mental health technology. After 14 years, I realized my longtime goal of leaving the desk job behind and pursing more hands-on work in my community.
I changed my career because I wanted to share what I’ve learned with others. I want to help other people live with less pain, more freedom, and to experience the joy of self-love.
It is my life’s work to help others find peace through embodiment.
Values and Beliefs
Guiding principles as a personal trainer:
Your body is already perfect.
There is no such thing as a bad body.
Weight loss is not a healthy goal by itself.
Movement is for everyone.
Exercise is not a punishment.
Food is not earned through exercise.
Rest is not earned.
Going hard, going home, and everything in between are all good options.
Guiding Principles as a person:
Healthcare, housing, and food are human rights.
No person is illegal.
Black, brown, POC, LGBTQ+, and indigenous lives matter.
War, genocide, colonialism, billionaires, and AI are bad.
Serving a differently-abled and neuro-diverse community
I’m a trans-masc, queer millennial living with multiple chronic illnesses and am in long-term recovery from C-PTSD and disordered eating. I’ve been diagnosed with ADHD since I was 15. I was diagnosed as AuDHD in 2023. I have experienced multi-year periods both on and off psychopharmaceutical medication and I live with treatment resistant depression.
I share these things to demonstrate my familiarity with navigating the world in an “othered” condition. It’s important to me that any service I offer can be offered to any person, regardless of any label, diagnosis, or condition and I will make accommodations to best serve you however I can. I always want to hear about how your experiences in your unique body are showing up for you in your movements, your abilities, and your feelings.
While I make a good faith effort to meet the needs of every potential client, there may be circumstances where the fit just isn’t there. I will always communicate honestly about what I can and cannot accommodate for any service.
Every body is different. Every person needs different things to feel supported and safe enough to try new things and grow. I write custom programming for each person I work with and every session begins with a check-in to best assess how we can move towards your goals on that specific day.