Where It All Started: My Path Into Fitness And Training

Welcome!

Thank you for coming and checking out my blog!

Why I Started This Blog

The current state of fitness information online is murky, to say the least. The explosion of exercise content has been a great thing overall, but it also comes with its own set of challenges. The amount of inaccurate information out there, whether intentional or accidental, is astounding, and it can be really hard for people to sift through it all and figure out what to trust.

Beyond misinformation, I see a lot of content being marketed to the general population that is, in reality, extremely niche. If you are relatively new to exercise and have pretty standard goals, the way to achieve them is usually pretty simple. The human body is complicated enough as it is, the last thing most beginners need is overly complex movement patterns being pushed as “essential.”

A lot of this stems from how people grow on social media. I’ll dive deeper into this in a future post, but posting the basics doesn’t get attention. To grow, people feel pressure to constantly invent new exercises or stir up controversy to drive engagement.

Thankfully, I have zero desire to be Instagram famous. You won’t find me intentionally creating discourse or reinventing the wheel for clicks. My goal with this blog, and my social media content in general, is to provide accurate, easy-to-understand exercise and nutrition information that actually helps everyday people on their fitness journey.

My Exercise and Training Journey

Looking back, I can point to three major influences that helped shape where I am today as a full-time personal trainer and gym owner: my parents, my friends, and my sister.

I’m privileged that growing up, exercise didn’t feel like a rare or uncommon thing and this is largely due to the great exercise role models in my parents. I’d see my mom on the elliptical/lifting weights or my dad hitting the punching bag and doing push ups in the garage and this definitely helped make exercise more approachable for me. Research even shows that one of the strongest predictors of a person’s future relationship with exercise is how active their parents are during childhood.

The second big influence was growing up before cell phones and the internet took over our lives. My neighborhood was full of kids my age, and we were constantly outside, running around, playing sports, and not coming home until the streetlights came on. I still remember scrubbing grass stains off my feet every summer night before I was allowed back in the house.

When I reached high school, many of those same neighborhood friends joined track and cross country with me. This was my first real exposure to structured, programmed training. Around the same time, I also started lifting weights at Prairie Athletic Club in Sun Prairie. To be honest, I had no idea what I was doing. Most of my workouts consisted of scrolling through Bodybuilding.com and trying whatever exercises looked cool that day.

(Check me out passing this guy in my first race ever!)

After high school, I was accepted into the University of Wisconsin–Madison with the intention of pursuing a degree in Biochemistry. After my first semester, it quickly became clear that this wasn’t the path for me. The pressure really set in at the end of my freshman year as I still didn’t have a direction yet.

At that same time, my sister was a senior in the Kinesiology department at UW–Madison. She urged me to go to an informational night to learn more about the major. Walking out of that seminar, I knew I wanted to pursue a career in the fitness industry and I credit my sister as one of the biggest influences on where I am today. She’s now an incredibly knowledgeable and experienced physical therapist in Chicago, and I still reach out to her regularly for advice on client injuries and rehab.

During my sophomore and junior years, I debated applying to physical therapy school multiple times. Ultimately, I decided I needed a break from school and wanted to enter the workforce. One of the last classes I took at Madison was a personal trainer preparation course. As I was finishing that course and getting certified, someone from Capital Fitness reached out to the Kinesiology department looking to hire trainers.

I graduated from UW–Madison on Saturday, May 11th, and started working as a full-

time personal trainer that Monday, May 13th.

I trained full time at Capital Fitness for about four years before scaling back my training hours and moving into management, eventually becoming the training manager. I loved this role and discovered that I had a real passion for business management. Toward the end of 2024, the owner announced plans to tear the gym down and a few of the other managers and I decided to step away and pursue opening our own gym.

That brings us to where we are today. Since December 2025, that gym has been The Strength Collective!

Looking Ahead

In future posts, I’ll be covering a wide range of topics, from meal prep advice and supplement effectiveness to exercise physiology and training principles. My hope is that this blog becomes a place where you can learn, ask questions, and feel inspired to make fitness a consistent part of your life.

Thanks again for reading. I’m excited to share this journey with you!

-Alex