My first week - by Randi Cantrell

It started a few weeks ago with a short e-mail forward from a friend.

“This couple came to my office and put on a seminar. They mentioned wanting an intern,” she said, “It is at least worth checking out their website!”
So I did. What I found was something worth much more than a passing glance, something strikingly different than the usual gyms, “bootcamps”, and “personal trainer” studios selling sweat and exercise to the masses.

A student at UCSD and currently studying for a personal trainer certification of my own, I’ve spent the last five or six weeks swimming in a flood of hand-written 3x5 flash cards and ambiguous charts and diagrams, reading about anatomy and exercise physiology, and attempting to magically pull a three-dimensional knowledge of the human body out of a two-dimensional explanation. To put it mildly, this wasn’t working. I could read all day long about the muscular system and which muscle was where and what it was responsible for, but that didn’t give me any understanding of how the body really works. Something was missing.

After Day One of my internship with The Wolf Studio, I knew I found that missing “something”.

Alan and Corina started me off with a full postural and biomechanical assessment so I could better understand the type of work that happens in the Studio. I’ve been working out in the big-name gym corporations since I was 11 or so, and I’ve worked with a number of different trainers over the past couple of years, but I have never experienced such a thorough assessment or received such detailed feedback. Simply put, among other things, Alan found that I have rounded shoulders (which explains a recent on-set of intermittent numbness/tingling in my right hand) and that I need to work on reactivating the muscles of my abdominal wall. I was then asked to design an exercise program for myself based on the results of my assessment. Alan wrote one as well, and the next day we compared the two. (I’m sure you can imagine how that went). Overall, I found that I need to be clear and confident about what I want out of myself and my body. “If your workouts are vague,” he said, “So are your results.” I realized that it doesn’t matter how many days I work out or how long my work outs are, if they don’t consist of the right exercises at the right intensity, and they lack a clear purpose, I’m just doing a whole lot of moving around without actually getting anywhere.

As a future personal trainer, this week came with an invaluable lesson for me. The human body is not “one size fits all” and as such, neither is its movement; every client I’ll someday encounter will come with his/her unique bodily quirks and idiosyncrasies brought on by muscle imbalances, injuries, and the like - my job will be to know how best to address, correct, and strengthen these “quirks” - how best to match the exercises that the client needs with the goals that they want to achieve. I couldn’t be more excited to keep learning.

More to come,
Randi